Reflections from a thin gourmand

At least “Viagra” sounded good: concise, vowel-rich, pronounceable. There is almost certainly a tenacious but artful midfielder in the FC Porto academy called something like Rúben Viagra. “Semaglutide”, though? The sound of the new weight-loss drug is itself a kind of appetite suppressant. Wegovy, Ozempic, Rybelsus: these are its unlovely trade names.

If the drug takes off, and curbs the obesity crisis, the advice in this column will be moot. It certainly isn’t scientific. These are the scattered observations of a man who enjoys food, spends too much on it, and remains slightly underweight. That might be biological randomness. But I suspect it owes at least something to the following rules of thumb.

It is easier to fast than to eat healthily. You aren’t going to stick to a diet of steamed vegetables and lean protein. You just aren’t. What you might do is avoid food all day, knowing that you have a free hand when you do dine. “Intermittent fasting” isn’t innately better than conventional dieting: calories in versus calories out is, unless experts wish to correct me here, what counts in the end. But it can be more tenable. Abstention doesn’t require you to do anything. An act of commission, such as eating food you don’t relish, does. On the same principle, I suspect lots of people find it easier to be celibate than monogamous.

You must be willing to upset people. A colleague invites you to lunch when you already have a large dinner planned. A lover brings you back a pastry from the café in the morning. Someone whose hospitality you are enjoying lays out a grid of baked delicacies between meals. What scoundrel, what churl, would refuse?

A thin one. Lots of eating, like lots of marrying, is done less out of desire than social obligation. Saying no will cause hurt. The offering of food is so ancient and pan-cultural a gesture that you yourself will feel like an infidel. But if this circumstantial duress to eat is an under-discussed cause of obesity, it is also a fixable one. The worst outcome is that someone resents you for a bit. You aren’t a teenager in a Californian high school drama. A certain imperviousness to peer pressure is a life skill you should have.

Lots of eating, like lots of marrying, is done less out of desire than social obligation

Beware pasta. Yes, it is the queen of carbs. When the FT was in SE1, I went to Padella 30 times in a calendar year. The triangle between Luca, Trullo and Brawn is well-worn ground for me. But the association with long-living Italians, with the “Mediterranean diet”, leads some to treat pasta as spinach or kale: healthy in almost any quantity. Those of a certain age, brought up to view it as the last word in continental finesse, are the most vulnerable. What should be an 80-ish gramme primo expands to monstrous dimensions. Then there is, in the US notably, the issue of drizzling and adulteration. At the restaurants above, when the primo course arrives, you will sometimes overhear diners imply to the staff or to each other that they are being ripped off. That’s how you know you’re in good hands.

Don’t expect to “burn it off”. Exercise is good for health, strength and mental wellbeing. Do it. Just don’t overrate the power of a riverside jog to cancel out a burger. This isn’t a model to emulate, but I am at my lightest as an adult, and also my least physically active. Again, there is a generational rift here. The primacy of diet in weight control is well understood among those my age or younger. Among those much older, the burn-it-off trope is disastrously persistent.

Know thy weight. To the decimal point. It will teach you which foods do what to you. Expect surprises, such as wine-and-cheese nights that leave nothing on you. It will also help you arrest unwanted weight gain at the start. Keeping a pound off is easier than losing it.

Email Janan at [email protected]

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