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HITCHENS: I DON'T DO DIETS Aug 18 2003

Christopher Hitchens on why he won't fall for the weight-loss gurus

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THERE'S an old conundrum, familiar to those who have viewed the clientele of health-food restaurants.

Did these people always look so pale and ill and scrawny and pustular? Or was it the nut cutlets and prune juice and special grains that made them that way?

In other words, which came first, the chicken or the egg - and which one would you be better advised to drop from your own intake?

The question is an important one because, if people stop asking it, there is a grave danger of emaciation in the wallets of unscrupulous doctors and the bank accounts of opportunist publishers - both of whom have grown unhealthily fat on selling books to people who want to see less of themselves.

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.

People who would never even pick up a book to improve their minds will lay down serious dough for the latest manual on slenderisation.

The most recent such fad is associated with the late Dr Robert Atkins, an American quack correctly (if accidentally correctly) described as a "diet guru".

Guru is about right, because the followers of such "healers" do resemble the members of a cult and, as with other cults, usually include a number of credulous and insecure Hollywood types.

Thus we learn that no less a person than Jennifer Aniston has made herself less corporeal by following the Atkins line of an all protein/no carbohydrate regime.

I ONCE heard a doctor friend describing in some detail how this particular diet "works".

The process isn't really fit for discussion in a family newspaper but, basically, the body reacts by using up such carbohydrate as the system has managed to "store" in the liver and muscles, and the weight-loss therefore results from, in effect, pi**ing yourself away.

Thus the many warnings that people hooked on the Atkins system will suffer damage to the kidneys.

As Bertie Wooster says about the awful diet fanatic Laura Pyke in that great story Jeeves And The Old School Chum, she talked about the lining of the stomach in a manner that was quite unsuited to mixed company.

Of course, in a few months or so we'll read of a miracle book that says a no-protein diet is just the thing... and another round of best-sellerdom will engulf another charlatan.

Meanwhile, the number of really slim and trim people you see will be exactly the same and most of these will have had the good taste to be born of slim and trim parents - the genes being the key to all this and not the intake.

The only "unwanted pounds" lost will be sterling ones - pitchforked into the churning maw of the publishing industry.

I have never sought to "turn my body into a fat-burning machine" (an image that is somehow more than faintly disgusting).

I follow medical advice in only one respect, which is to make sure that I swallow the two shots of alcoholic medicine that doctors now agree is essential for the heart and the arteries.

(And remember - no cheating. The New England Journal Of Medicine is very clear on this. At least two drinks, and every day. No skipping. No skimping, please.)

For the rest, a high-anxiety lifestyle and a minimum of strenuous exercise means that I can still see my feet (on a clear day, that is, and if for any reason I should wish to see them).

I also took special note of the recent finding that decaffeinated coffee beans are higher in cholesterol and that nicotine aids concentration and helps to ward off Alzheimer's disease.

My doctor keeps asking me how I do it. And that's the relationship I want to have with my doctor - giving him advice instead of taking it from him.

Consider, I say, that you are born into a losing struggle, as are we all. I have been into this and looked a fair way down the road, and I can tell you that nobody emerges from this struggle a winner.

The best way of getting through is to eat and drink heartily, in order to keep up your strength, and to ask yourself why it is that you meet more old drunks than old doctors.

I see people in California making themselves miserable the entire time, by eating a mournful lettuce leaf at lunchtime, wearing out their knee joints by jogging, tearing their muscles on brutal exercise machines, avoiding the gorgeous sunshine because of its toxic rays and sticking to the insipid forms of white wine that don't fight arterial hardening but, on the other hand, do give you memorable acidity.

The main complaint of these people is that they don't seem to have as much energy as they used to. Small wonder!

Throw away that lettuce leaf, I tell them. Chuck out that Chardonnay.

RELAX. There's nothing amiss that a solid martini, followed by a thick sirloin and some crusty bread - washed down with some fine, old bloodstained Burgundy - wouldn't cure.

Now the cult of the silhouette - along with the anti-smoking mania and all the rest of it - has leap-frogged the Atlantic. There's something especially ludicrous at seeing the British go all coy about their "body image" and physical self-esteem.

Do they think that the laws of gravity will be suspended in their own case and that things will not buckle and sag, or even fill out a bit, if they go into a frenzy of weight-watching?

There are models and ballet dancers in America who have died pointlessly in their beautiful 20s, with the verdict of the coroner - dressed up a bit for the press - being starvation.

And though anorexia and bulimia and kindred obsessions don't kill all that often, they do have the most awful effect on, of all things, the appearance.

Lose too much fat too quickly and you will get a cadaverous or wrinkled face in no time. And further down on the gravitational scale, it can be better to have a rounded derriere than, say, to have no derriere at all.

Perhaps that is as far as I had better go today - in any case, I must be a fool giving dietary advice for free when I could be making a mint from the endless delusion of eternal or renewable youth.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

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