Don't Dilettante On The Way!

Marie Lloyd was born in Hoxton and died on stage a few miles north of there in Edmonton. That's Edmonton, North London, by the way: not Edmonton, Alberta. In Marie Lloyd's day, Hoxton was a right hole, the pits of the East End, while Edmonton was several rungs up the finely graduated social ladder. Heading due north up what evolves into the London - Hertford Road, you'd progress from Hoxton, through Dalston, Stamford Hill, Tottenham, to Edmonton, each one being a little bit 'nicer' than the one before. Not that Edmonton was in any way genteel, but it was mos' definitely more respectable than rackety old Hoxton.

My, my, but how things have changed in the years since Marie turned up her toes at The Empire. For a start, eleven years later, in 1933, the music hall closed and was turned into a cinema. In 1951, its name was changed to the Granada. Sometime in the 60's, it declined into a bingo hall, and was torn down in 1970. That declining arc exemplifies what's happened to Edmonton as a whole. When William Cowper wrote The Ballad of John Gilpin in 1782, Edmonton was a pleasant country town of popular resort, a place you would choose for a honeymoon, in fact:
"To-morrow is our wedding-day,
And we will then repair
Unto 'The Bell' at Edmonton,
All in a chaise and pair."

The local council destroyed historic Edmonton Green in 1965, and even, in 1989, managed to tear down its handsome crenellated perpendicular Town Hall, designed by G. Eedes Eachus, and later enlarged by W. Gilbee Scott. What was the Central Library is now the Islamic Cultural Centre, whilst the Methodist Central Hall is now a fraction of what used to stand on Fore Street, with its large, handsome church hall itself demolished, like the Anglican church which used to stand at the corner of Fore Street and Brettenham Road, long gone; no call for it. Likewise, I suspect the disappearance of a remarkable shop called Studio 248 which, fifty years ago, was one of the first Bang & Olufsen dealers in the UK. Can't imagine they'd sell much B&O gear in contemporary Edmonton, and they'd certainly never get insured!

Frankly, Edmonton has turned into a place you wouldn't want to walk at night: or during the day, for that matter. In the first three months of 2008 alone, five young men were murdered on its streets, most of them victims of knife crime. The area, with one of the highest proportions of residents living on state benefits in the UK, is so violent, it has become known to police and locals alike as 'Shank Town'. Good, eh? Like Mr Zappa once said, 'a real nice place to bring your kids up.' If they lived so long. It all feels a bit like the world described by Hobbes in Leviathan where the life of man is described as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,' and brings sharply to mind National Lampoon's vicious but wonderful Deteriorata (so much more au point than the egregious and unctuous original!). Do click that link if you've never heard it. You'll not need telling if you have; you'll already be there!

If that's what Edmonton's like nowadays, the southern half of Hoxton, just north of the City, on the other hand, is the metropolis's heart of design, software development, artists' studios, and loft living, with a vibrant bar, club and restaurant scene which is gradually pushing north. All a bit lively for me, in fact, and our London place is just up the road from it in Islington which is surely trendy and raving enough for most people?

Marie Lloyd it was who, in 1918, first introduced the song about a family of serial moonlight flit merchants, My Old Man (Said Follow The Van), a late big hit for her although she never recorded it (Miss Piggy did, and here's a link to her uniquely stellar version). IShe went to Edmonton, and died. In full view of a packed house, who laughed as she collapsed, thinking it was all part of the act. Do you start to see where I'm going with this? Feeling my way in the dark, to be sure, but pretty certain I'm on the trail of something unpleasant. It seems to me that the chorus of that old music hall number exemplifies what goes wrong with many folks' weight loss plans. We're generally disposed to dilly dally all the bloody way! Like me getting to this point in the narrative, in fact. Perhaps because I don't want to get where this is leading?

The thing is. we food addicts are at the same time the world's most masterful procrastinators, and its most skilful dissemblers. I know whereof I speak. Honest truth, and trust me, cross my heart &c. Look, I've been honing this act a long old time. An Oscar winning performance every day. Same with you, right? Just between you and me, food addict to food addict.

Weighed down with adipose tissue and hollow-ringing good intentions, we allow ourselves to get distracted, wander off to smell the flowers, lose our focus and our grip, eat excessively and inappropriately. And then we'll justify it, at amazing length. No-one does excuses like the kid found with jam smeared round its mouth, cake crumbs down its front, and the hand deep in the rapidly emptying cookie jar. 'I say, you chaps, yarroo, geroff.' We are all of us Billy Bunter conning our way through the world, just as Jim White reminded readers of the Telegraph a couple of years ago.

This 24-hour floating shell game can run one of two ways depending on whom we're lying to at any given moment, namely ourselves or a significant other.

The significant other bit is the easy one to nail down. We are arrogant and so we believe them to be blind, naive, gullible and stupid. For a start, we are not fat (are we?), and we deny, resent it and blame them when dare raise the topic with us, and should they so dare, we just lie our heads and bully them into silent, defeated submission every time. 'Did you have lunch today?' 'I just grabbed a sandwich.' As if you don't already know, this 'sandwich' translates into normal-speak as 'a Big Mac, double cheeseburger, large fries, and a chocolate shake', or equivalent. Well, MaccyD's call the bloody things sandwiches, don't they, so what's wrong with that? It's as dishonest as the words 'just the one, then' on the lips of a bloke stepping into the pub. Once again, I know what I'm talking about. But we tell ourselves every time that this isn't real lying, is it? Taking a step back, it strikes me this is really a bit Arthur Daly-ish, as in 'It's not as if it's a crime, is it? Well, yeah, technically it's a crime, but it's not criminal, is it?'

And remember, we know, don't we, that our loved ones always fail to notice that we're getting fatter. Could we despise worse the people that are nearest to us, than to treat them with such contempt and disdain? Because our choosing to stay fat and get fatter is a repeated slap in the face to our loved ones. We choose our fat over them. They know, and are hurt by, the fact that we are electing to pursue ill health and a premature demise. We simply just don't care. Do we? Ever heard a junky saying he's got it under control? He's just chipping. They all bloody say it - at least, they all start off saying it. And it ain't no difference with an eating jones; we're all - again, at least - psychologically addicted to eating, because we prefer the way that eating makes us feel. Admit it. It makes us feel better than we did before, and better than we get from anything else. Better, in fact, than our loved ones makes us feel. That's got to hurt people, don't you think? Well, yes you do. But you still don't care. You just keep lying.

The lying to ourselves bit, on the other hand, that's the tricky one. We don't like the owning up bit at all, and we con ourselves more successfully than we do anyone else. First off, everyone else can see us getting fat. We don't (most of the time); we generally manage to blank that one easy as (er) pie. At the very most, we'll admit that (enter name of chosen item of clothing) must have shrunk. Let's face it, that's the only plausible explanation. Not my fault, (adopting voice of a petulant, spoilt, and entirely selfish child).

Then there's the whole dilettante dieting thing. Until recently, I've been bemused by the number of people I've either met or encountered online who have owned up enough to have outed themselves as being 'on a diet', of whatever kind. Whilst they've publicly declared their intention to lose a few pounds/stone/hundredweight (delete as appropriate), they display an evident complete lack of interest or curiosity about a) how they got to be fat in the first place, and b) how their chosen diet works, and what happens next when they've landed at their target. In fact, I'm not sure most of them could give a reasoned explanation of how they came to choose the diet they claimed to be on.

Like I say, I was bemused by this, and could not understand their indifference to the mechanics of what they were ostensibly putting themselves through. I realise now that many of these people are actually demonstrating, whether they realise it or not, that they have no real interest whatsoever in stirring themselves to change their behaviours. They won't say, for instance, 'If fast food made me fat, let me learn to cook for myself.' No, allow me to drift back to where I started (I was comfortable there...). Another one is 'I'm doing the Atkins. I've got the book,and everything, (I skimmed through a couple of chapters, once).' I'm not making the effort, I'm not committing to this, I'm making a good show but I'm really only playing, so you can't blame me when it goes wrong because I KNOW IT WILL. Like the Holy Modal Rounders sang, 'Bound to lose'! Nothing like a self-fulfilling prophecy....

All this means - the ONLY thing it means - is that, despite your promises, proclamations, and assertions, your jones has still got you. Sooner or later it's going to turn up like Mephistopheles to claim back its own. We're like Robert Johnson, at the Crossroads, we've each done a deal with the devil and now we've got to deal with the outcome.

The worry is that deep down, deeper down than you have ever allowed your conscious self to go, you do not want to change. You want your diet to fail, so you can go back to doing what you were happy doing, 'knowing you gave it your best shot.' You are not afraid to fail with your weight loss. You are actually afraid to succeed, because succeeding requires you to go through some pretty damn fundamental changes, and that's what's scary.

For years, we have each been eating because it gives us comfort, satisfaction, and a good feeling to eat. But hang on, I'm not talking about the comfort, satisfaction and good feeling that comes from putting paid to the pangs of hunger. The fact is, most of us fat folk don't allow ourselves the time between feeds to ever get physically hungry.

Instead, the hungers we are sating are of a different darker kind. It's a bit like sex. Everyone knows that there are good, warm, life-enhancing (and life-producing) sexual urges, desires and needs. But we also know, from the nightly news (and for some of us, unfortunately, our own experience) that there exist other dimensions to sex that are completely destructive and opposed to life. Most of us tend to label the more extreme of these urges as perverted and condemn them when they are acted out, with this condemnation being embedded in the legal structures which underpin our society. Freud talked in terms of the competition between Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts. This has been the basis of an ongoing argument ever since. Here's a curious (and curiously anonymous) paper with some interesting points on the subject.

I know it's a repeated theme throughout the Boot Camp blog, but it's becoming daily more evident to me that this whole diet thing requires a number of key elements to be in place, otherwise it is doomed, so I'll not apologise for saying it again:

1) Your head has to be in the right place - you must profoundly desire to change a whole raft of destructive and dysfunctional behaviours that are damaging you and your relationships, of which your relationship with food is just one.

2) You must jettison everything to do with how you've been eating, and construct a determined plan to eat better, and to eat less to enable you to lose your excess weight and improve your health. The more you avoid processed, packaged food the better. Prepare your own food from fresh ingredients. Learn to cook if you need to: good, simple, wholesome, nutritious food is cheap and easy to make and need take only minutes from raw ingredients to ready on the table. In a phrase: Eat With Consciousness.

3) Do not allow yourself to backslide. If what you were doing was wrong, don't go back and do it again. You are not a dog returning to lick up its own vomit. At all times, apply the Paresh Principle of SDCM - self determination, control & motivation - and check yourself to prevent a return to the bad behaviours which will always be attracting you. Accept that, as a lifelong food addict, inappropriate and excessive eating is a temptation into which you will always be lead, and arm yourself with strategies to counter this. Forewarned is forearmed, and knowing that it's going to be an unending rocky road and preparing yourself to deal with it is a world away from putting on a good show for the bleachers while expecting (and secretly wanting) the whole damn thing to fail. SDCM - self determination, control & motivation. I don't know about you, but I'm in this thing for life. Otherwise I will end up using food, a good thing I need to sustain my life, to end my life. WTF? Did you ever see a strange 1973 film called La Grande Bouffe? It's about a group of men who, for reasons that are irrelevant here, decide to eat themselves to death. We should all have a copy of this on ourselves, because it's what we're all doing to ourselves. Marcello Mastroianni et al manage to obtain their goal over an incredible gluttonous and lustful weekend. Although I must admit to having had weekends that were not too dissimilar, by and large the rest of us are far less consciously going along a slightly longer route to the same inevitable conclusion. Only I'm off the bus. I want you to join me. Applying SDCM is never going to be easy, but it becomes easier, and you will become stronger. It demands that you commit. It demands that you take a page from Pops Staples songbook and start respecting yourself. More and more, day by day, you will - and increasingly you'll come to love the person you really are. Those near to you already love you, now respect them and show them someone who's worthy of their love and loyalty.

Get these three planets in a Grand Alignment and you're cooking real, sustaining food with gas - because you'll have your demons back in the jar.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I am promising you can do - and I'm also saying you must do it, if you want to stop dilettante dieting and get rid of this weight loss/weight gain yo-yo for once and all.

And it's going to be great starting right now - this instant - for the majority of us round here who are in the northern hemisphere, because it's after noon on the 21st December, Winter Solstice, which means that things have changed and, whilst it's our darkest day today, we're already heading back into the light.

Let the ghost of Marie Lloyd free her cock linnet from its cage, and we'll dilly dally no more. Instead I'll see you down the Old Bull and Bush with the equally striking spirit of Florrie Ford for a decent steak and a bit of a sing-song. And we'll all get thinner together. Deal? We'll beat down the devil.

Because Robert Johnson is one of the great artists of the last century, and too many people are unaware he ever existed, here's links to a couple more of his songs: Me And The Devil (with a nicely conceived cartoon that suggests that the devil is very much part of the protagonist), and the even more disturbed, and even seasonal, Hellhound On My Trail. His was clearly not an untroubled life. If you've never thought to listen to the dark mysteries of country blues before in your life, treat yourself to the Sony Legacy edition of the complete Robert Johnson recordings, for less than four quid. That such a life's work could be swept up for so little money.

With the blues falling down like hail, but nevertheless looking for the silver lining, till the next time,

Your old pal,

Fred