After years spent running weight loss programs for both sexes, in 1985 Brooker began his unique class for men. He’d come to realize that men and women approach the problem of weight in strikingly different ways, almost like two species. Men aren’t socialized to think about it, as many women are. Since men typically cook far less than women, we are less equipped to analyze the content of what we eat. We don’t often read food labels, and many of us wrongly believe we can work off the pounds through exercise alone. Above all, our culture genially forgives fatness in men, as it does not in women. Men’s magazines provide plenty of advice on muscle development but show little interest in weight. Brooker makes that point in a book he wrote two years ago, It’s Different for Men: “Would Outdoor Life suggest a program to lose ten pounds in two weeks?”
One day, when the class discussed the value of an all-male program, enthusiastic nods of agreement endorsed a member’s opinion that men are embarrassed to speak about their weight with women present. Men feel it’s not an altogether appropriate subject for male conversation. Brooker has overcome this barrier by creating a place where we can feel comfortable discussing our problems with food.
But the program’s demands presented me with another hurdle. As Brooker says, newcomers often attend their first meetings with arms crossed, as if daring him to overcome their misgivings. My problem wasn’t any lack of confidence in him; I didn’t trust me. As he explained his system that first day, it became clear that he was asking me to do something I had never done before: commit myself to a process he had designed. “I have the answer,” he’ll say. “Leave your ego at the door. Give in.” I would need to be far more attentive than I had expected. I would have to take his advice and his rules seriously. Against all my instincts, I would have to do as I was told.
Beyond the fundamentals of sensible eating, Brooker teaches the intimate art of self-command, what Samuel Johnson called “the government of the passions.” There are many enviable people who possess an automatic governor on their appetites and live long lives without ever worrying about their weight. But the rest of us suffer from an inborn failure of judgment: we don’t know when to stop. It can be traced back millions of years, to a time when our ancestors stayed alive only if they stored fat in their bodies when it was available. In evolutionary terms, as Elizabeth Kolbert summarized in a New Yorker piece, “A person with a genetic knack for storing fat would have had a competitive advantage.” Gluttony, far from being self-destructive, was a key to survival. Enthusiastic eaters became our ancestors, whereas naturally dainty eaters grew thin when the food ran out and often didn’t live long enough to pass on their genes. The survivors, notes Kolbert, are responsible for one of the most depressing results reported by diet researchers: when enormous amounts of food are served to people taking part in experiments, many will eat far more than they require to satisfy any conceivable need.
In recent decades, the food industry has done everything possible to turn this habit into its own competitive advantage. Food engineers, putting their ingenuity to work in labs and test kitchens, use sugar, fat, and salt in increasingly imaginative ways, devising cheap, easily digested forms of food that are so attractive they become addictive — so-called eatertainment. A minor item being promoted at the supermarket checkout — Kolbert’s example is Nacho Cheese Doritos — represents the refined wisdom of chemists whose goal is to make us so happy with what we are putting in our mouths that we will want to repeat the process soon. David A. Kessler, a sharp and pessimistic critic of the food industry, invented the term “conditioned hypereating” to describe the goal of corporate food scientists. As good capitalists, they know that expansion is essential to the health of a corporation. Cleverly, they expand their market by expanding the size of their customers.
To counteract the effects of these two converging tendencies, prehistoric and modern, Brooker preaches “chronic restrained eating.” A typical piece of advice deals with hunger. If we eat properly, we should never be hungry. We are told, for example, to take hunger into account when we plan social engagements. I hadn’t heard that sensible rule before; now I never break it. If I go hungry to a dinner party, I know I’m in danger of eating every morsel offered to me on the hostess’s little silver dishes. But if I have some relatively harmless snack at home (celery, an apple, a banana, a half-litre or so of water), I’ll have circled around the end of my hunger and disarmed it. I’ll remember my good intentions and ignore any persistent traces of hunger.
Brooker views most highway restaurants with suspicion and exhibits a special hatred for all-you-can-eat buffets, which he never fails to call “the trough.” His eating plan allows for no more than a moderate amount of alcohol. He devotes more time and passion to what he calls “novelties,” his term for anything that’s entertaining rather than nutritious. He regularly issues warnings against pizza and anything fried. I never knew, till Brooker told me, that if I ignored some favourite but harmful food for a few months I would lose the desire to eat it. That includes steak frites, which I treated as a staple food for many years. Now, to my surprise, I don’t crave it or even notice when a friend orders it for lunch.
While we often discuss what we can and cannot eat, well-schooled Brooker students carefully avoid the word “diet.” A diet is something people “go on” and then, in time, “go off,” frequently with disheartening results. It’s a promise with a self-cancelling clause. As Brooker sees it, we avoid dieting and instead (all going well) permanently change our way of eating — and, not incidentally, change our lives. But we all hold in our minds a negative, destructive force. Brooker calls that impulse Slick, as if it were an old-time con man. Slick is the voice in your head that says, go ahead, just have one, it can’t do any harm, you’ve done well on your diet, you deserve a treat, everybody else is having cake, relax. No, says Brooker, on the question of food you don’t relax. And you should never celebrate your triumph on the scales by returning to the ways that once made such a triumph impossible.
The twenty-seven stairs we climb to reach our meeting room have acquired a legendary status and become part of Brooker’s teaching. I’ve heard a dozen men say how hard they found it to haul their 300 pounds upstairs, as compared to how easy it is now that they are, say, 120 pounds lighter. “You would not have walked up the stairs if you weren’t in pain,” Brooker says. Those who found that staircase difficult must never forget their feelings. To stay thin, we should always remember how much we disliked being fat. We can lose the weight we want to lose, and we should be happy about it, but we should never imagine we are truly, safely, finally thin: “There is a fat man inside you who wants to get out.”
That first Sunday, I decided that what Brooker offered was worth at least the $1,875 he charged for a one-year membership. Like everyone else, I set my goal weight upon joining, 200 pounds in my case. Once I achieved that number, I could attend permanently without further payment; I’d be asked to pay again only if my weight rose five pounds and I wanted to remain in the program. Nowadays, I’m among a few dozen non-paying members who come every Sunday, keeping in touch with our old comrades and, above all, with ourselves and our weight. I’m usually sitting beside my son, who followed me into the program in 2008 and is at least as enthusiastic as I am, having lost more than ninety pounds.
