Fat Chance (29 page)

Yeah.

Riiiiiight
.

Let’s start with the Chatman Diet.

Or should I say, let’s start with the Professor Montague
Chatman
Approach to Effective Nutrition and Metabolic Health.

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

Montague Chatman sounds like the kind of serious, bearded intellectual who has spent decades in a laboratory somewhere, coming up with new and interesting ways to help you lose enough weight to fit into that black party dress you saw in H&M last week.

What’s more, his Approach to Effective Nutrition and
Metabolic
Health is contained within three hundred pages of
hardback
book—full of diagrams, pie charts, complicated formulas, and big long words like ‘glucagon,’ ‘epinephrine,’ and ‘oxidization.’

The book has been a bestseller in thirty countries, further
adding
weight to its credence as a weight loss method.

. . . So thinks Zoe Milton anyway, as she purchases a copy of the book from WH Smith with the voucher her mum sent on her birthday.

What a magnificent-looking book it is, too!

It’s got a
bright
red cover, with
bright
white and green writing. The excitement of all that potential weight loss fairly leaps out at you when you’re just holding the damn thing.
‘The multi-million bestseller!
’ it informs you in a splash across the top of the book’s jacket.
‘The scientifically proven way to a slimmer waistline!
’ another equally bold strapline screams at you from the bottom.

When you crack the book open you find that the actual content is written in a large, easy-to-read font . . . so they’ve even taken steps to prevent you suffering eye strain. This must be the reason for such big letters. It can’t possibly be because they’re having to stretch a small amount of spurious and badly researched information across enough pages to fill a whole book.
Oh no
.

I sit down in the living room early one dull Sunday afternoon with a glass of fruit juice (mango, not grapefruit) and begin to read this marvellous book.

Ten minutes later I’m more confused than a Tory politician
in L
idl.

The tactic of Montague and his cronies is to baffle you with enough long words and pseudo-science that you just end up
believing
everything they say, so as not to come across as a thickie.

What I did manage to glean from the first fifty pages or so was that the Chatman diet is about controlling the amount of
carbohydrates
, fats, and acids that go into your body, which will in turn affect your metabolic rate—speeding it up to such an extent that cream cakes don’t stand a chance against the cleansing fire burning from within every molecule of your body.

By following Chatman’s method you avoid what he likes to call ‘metabolic anti-stasis.’ This sounds extremely nasty.

The book then goes on to discuss the best way to accomplish this. Again, a lot of long words are thrown around with gay abandon.

I thought a jam doughnut was just a jam doughnut, but it turns out that it is in fact a ‘negative metabolic inducer’ which can lead to a ‘higher density of lifoproteinates.’

Now I don’t know about you, but having a higher density of lifoproteinates sounds like a bad thing to me. I don’t have a fucking clue what a lifoproteinate is, but I’m damn sure I want to keep my density of them low.

It’s frankly amazing how many foods are bad for your metabolic rate according to Professor Chatman. Human evolution would seem to dictate that there are at least
some
food substances out there that are good for you—otherwise the human race would have died out millennia ago as soon as it took a bite out of the first banana it came across. But old Montague seems to completely disagree. According to him, the human body is not meant to eat all the food that’s just lying around. That way lies madness—and an unhealthy amount of back fat.

Carbohydrates might as well be the work of the devil as far as he is concerned, and the way he rips into foods heavy with lactose gives me the impression that at some point in his youth he must have been molested by a milkman.

Monty (after two hundred pages I feel like we’re on first-name terms) then starts to talk at length about amino acids. He has decided, in his infinite wisdom, that my metabolic rate is
dependent
on the level of amino acids I use. Why? Because of the enantiomers and stereoisomers, silly!

You know what enantiomers and stereoisomers are, don’t you?

They’re just by-products of the isoelectric process!

Still a bit confused?

You’re not the only one.

I have the distinct feeling that any passing biochemists would look at Monty’s theories and claw their own eyes out with the
stupidity
of the whole thing—but I’m no expert, am I?

Who am I to judge the veracity of Monty’s claims? After all, his book has sold millions of copies, and there can’t be
that
many people who would just blindly follow a load of hack scientific blather in their desperation to lose a few pounds, can there?

By page two hundred and fifty I have entered a state of near
catalepsy
. I’ve been bombarded with so much information I’m
finding
it hard to uncross my eyes. According to Monty, I am a methanogenic and carbonic life form low in selenocysteine and hydroxyproline.

But then . . . salvation!

Friendly, helpful Professor Montague Chatman is now ready to explain all of this nonsense in simple, easy-to-understand sentences that feature words of no more than three syllables.

It turns out that Chatman and his colleagues have done all the painstaking research so we don’t have to! We don’t need to know which foods are negative inducers or isoelectric inhibitors! Woo hoo! Just when I thought I’d have to take the entire biology section of the library with me every time I go to bloody Tesco, the good Professor has come along to save me all that time and inconvenience.

You see, his crack team of nutritionists have devised and created a whole smorgasbord of healthy foods and drinks, designed to speed up your metabolic rate and kick those evil lifoproteinates to the kerb.

The last thirty pages of the Chatman diet book is basically one long advertisement for their own brand of health shakes, health bars, health snacks, and health meals.

Now, I’m not normally the kind of person who pays that much attention to advertising if I can help it, but I have spent the past four hours reading about how the food I eat is effectively killing me in a slow, painful and lifoproteinate-rich way. Professor Monty has more or less convinced me that if I don’t immediately start eating and drinking his products I will become so full of poisonous amino acids that my weight will balloon to elephantine proportions and I will die of metabolic anti-stasis within the month.

Helpfully, the book contains links to the Chatman website, where I can purchase all the healthy Chatman-approved food I need to dodge this grim fate.

The website recommends I buy the full weekly complement of products, which includes a snack for every morning, a shake for every lunch, and a meal for every dinner.

All of this costs . . .

. . . wait for it . . .

Seventy-five pounds!

Yes, for just seventy-five quid a week I can stave off the spectre of chubby thighs
and
metabolic cell death.

Having not been brought up in a small room with no access to the outside world, I instead order a box of ten lunchtime health shakes. This is still twenty-five quid’s worth, mind you, so I obviously haven’t seen enough of the outside world, regardless of where I was brought up.

Monty’s book begrudgingly admits you can just supplement two meals a day with the health shake, provided you eat a meal of less than five hundred calories in the evening. Obviously someone down in marketing realised that not everyone can afford the complete package, so there must be an alternative that’s slightly easier on the pockets of the poor. Better to fleece them of some money than none at all.

A couple of days later the shakes arrive and I embark on the carefully laid out programme that the book provides in a handy fold-out section.

So now I’m a fully grown adult drinking two thick shakes a day. The last time I consumed this kind of drink in such quantities I was eight years old and didn’t give a shit about my weight.

Apparently, the shakes have all the necessary vitamins,
minerals
, and trace elements I need to keep me going through the day. This is all very well, but they don’t appear to contain much actual taste. They are also a rather unpleasant shade of grey. I ordered the banana-flavoured ones as I love a nice banana, but I can only assume that the nearest this gloopy mess ever got to a real banana was having one waved over it for a couple of seconds before they put the lid on.

Keeping your lifoproteinate levels down may well be important to your metabolic rate, but it sure as hell doesn’t do much for your taste buds.

Nevertheless, I stuck at the diet for a whole month. This is officially the longest I have managed to stick with one of these
programs
in the entire time I’ve been part of the Fat Chance competition.

Not because it was any
good
, of course—don’t be so silly. The only reason I stuck with it is because Professor Montague Chatman had scared the crap out of me with all his talk of metabolics, lifo-bloody-proteinates, and isoelectric processes. He’d done enough to convince me that if I didn’t stick to his program, I’d just keep getting fatter and fatter until my brain was consumed by my own body lard.

It has to be said that over the course of the month I did indeed lose weight from drinking just the shakes and eating a low-
calorie
meal for tea. After thirty days I actually began to believe that
the d
iet was worth it—that Chatman’s claims were valid. Maybe there was something to all this metabolic anti-stasis, enantiomer
whodoyouwh
atsit business after all.

Then Greg saw the credit card bill and we had a lively
discussion
about it.

‘A hundred fucking quid on milkshakes!’

‘They don’t have milk in them.’

‘I don’t care if they’re flavoured with pure gold and give you superpowers. It’s a hundred fucking quid!’

‘You wasted enough cash on all those stupid exercise machines!’

‘I know! That’s why I’m sure you’re wasting your money on this Chatman shit.’

‘No, I’m not!’

‘Really? Go on Google and look him up,’ Greg challenged me.

So I bloody well did!

Shit.

It didn’t take me long to scroll down past the promotional Chatman website entries and get to the independent opinion sites.

It wasn’t pleasant.

The science of the Professor Montague Chatman Approach to Effective Nutrition and Metabolic Health was as big a load of steaming horseshit as I’d first feared. I discovered reams of proper scientific study that showed how Chatman’s methodologies were made up out of nothing but fresh air.

What’s more, Professor Montague Chatman wasn’t even a bloody Professor. Monty turned out to be a disgraced doctor from Middlesex who’d been struck off the register thirty years ago for giving out blank prescriptions to his old Eton buddies in exchange for cold, hard cash.

His name wasn’t even Montague.

I’d spent over a hundred pounds of my hard-earned money on a weight loss program devised by Barry Chatman.

Barry
. Is there a less dependable-sounding first name in the English language?

Oh, and Barry had popped his clogs in 1997 anyway. All that money had in fact gone to the company that now runs and owns the Chatman diet brand. It’s called ACP Petrochemicals. They also own three sugar refining companies, a fast-food brand, and a mail order business. The same mail order business I’d received my shakes from during the previous month.

I would have felt crestfallen if I hadn’t felt so bloody stupid.

‘But the diet worked!’ I pleaded with Greg once I’d got him to stop laughing.

‘Did it?’

‘Yes!’

The patronising tone he effected made my teeth itch. ‘Now Zoe, don’t you think you would have lost all that weight anyway? Even if you’d been drinking one-pound Asda smoothies? Or, you know, water?’

I wanted to argue. I really, really did. But the bastard was absolutely right.

I’d been well and truly suckered. In my desire to lose weight—and to make it seem like I hadn’t been completely baffled by all those scientific terms—I’d become a gullible idiot.

Still, I’m not alone.

The diet industry is worth a purported
thirty billion quid
worldwide, I’m led to believe. Barry and his fellow shysters are slicing themselves a pretty big chunk of that cake.