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EAT AND RUN.

Article Excerpt
On January 20, 2003, the English journalist William Leith decides he has to lose weight. That's the day he gets on the bathroom scale and finds that it's "the fattest day of my life": he's just over six feet tall and he weighs two hundred and thirty-six pounds. He feels lousy. He feels repulsive. In fact, he is repulsive. His girlfriend tells him to stop tucking his shirt into his trousers--"It just bulks you out"--and she doesn't want to have sex with him anymore. He resolves, not for the first time, to do something about it. He gets on a plane and goes to New York to see Dr. Atkins, and he decides, more or less at the same time, to write a book about his eating problems. "The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict" (Gotham; $25) is the result: Bridget Jones with a Y chromosome, a significant coke habit, and a sneaky sort of intellectual ambition.

Leith's book is about food addiction, but he's interested in all sorts of addictions and what it is about our culture that makes it so easy to stuff ourselves, leaving us filled but unfulfilled: "This is the fat society. This is where people come, so they can have exactly what they want. And what they want is . . . more." Most of all, he's interested in himself. If he can figure out why he's a food addict, then maybe he can figure out why he's unhappy: "I am fat because I have other, deeper problems." And if he can figure out what these deeper problems are then maybe he can stop stuffing himself. The cure has two courses. The physical bit is getting the weight off; the psychological bit is getting the weight off his mind. Dr. Atkins takes care of the first. Leith arrives at Atkins's Manhattan clinic just months before the great man's death, and about two years before the "low-carb craze" will itself be pronounced dead, with the venture-capital-crammed Atkins Nutritional, Inc., going into bankruptcy. But Atkins is then enjoying a boom: some months before, Gary Taubes published a pro-Atkins polemic in the Times Magazine ("What If It's All Been a Big, Fat Lie?"), and a copy of New York that Leith picks up declares, "Welcome to a City in the Throes of CARB PANIC." Leith masters the Atkins metabolic mantra: carbohydrates cause a rush of insulin; the insulin reduces blood glucose, causing cravings for more carbs; the body becomes insulin-resistant; and it shifts its attention to saving fat. Food fat doesn't make your body fat; carbs are the culprit. As the pounds fall off--thirty in four months--Leith becomes an evangelist: his obituary of Atkins in the Guardian of April 19, 2003, is a panegyric. He reads Thomas Kuhn's historical theory of scientific development and decides that Atkins is achieving nothing less than a dietary "paradigm change." Atkins is a hero of our time.

The other part of the cure is psychotherapy. The Atkins diet is the instrumental arm of a psychodynamic search: it's good to lose weight in the most effective way you can, but Leith still feels the need to sort out the psychic reasons that he's become a fatty. There's much recollecting of childhood traumas; original sin for Leith was not an apple but an apple pie--one of his grandmother's that he secretly gobbled down at the age of seven. By the end of his therapy, Leith has concluded that...

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