Hannah Borno

Today is my birthday. I had coffee at Columbia Road Flower market followed by a mixed parillada lunch at Buen Ayre grill house. Sitting in front of several pounds of meat - black pudding, Argentinean sausage, sweetbreads and steak - for an hour or so was not exactly perfect Mindless Eating practice but surely I’m allowed a day off on my birthday? Later, drinking Prosecco, I discover a stack of hula hoops at 93 Feet East, hoop for half an hour (good for core body strength, bad if you’re full of steak and sweetbreads) then finish with a bar crawl taking in The Big Chill, Corbett Place and The Gun. You know an evening’s going badly if you end up drinking bitter at The Gun. I have a massive argument with Charlie and end up lying in the back garden for fresh air before sullenly coming back in to wrap crockery in newspaper all night.

NEXT DAY

I get up early to pack the van and do shuttles to new flat. After eight car loads, four van loads and ten taxi loads, the flat is now filled from wall to wall with boxes and black bags. The Brazilians have already rung to tell me that neither the shower nor oven works in the Shoreditch flat. Great.

Returning the van I experience terrible chest pains on the A12. I’m trying not to let it worry me and we stop off at the Welcome Break for KFC (last time I ate this was a decade ago). I’m also so hung-over I could cry. So I cry. Why am I living my life at this fever pitch of anxiety, cortisol coursing through my veins? My amethyst crystals sit unused in my handbag.

My mind and body seem to be in crisis. Since my wedding last October I’ve put on a stone, closely followed by another stone after working in an office for three months - alongside some delightful colleagues who were all very fond of cake. I was even fonder of cake, so cake consumption turned into a daily social ritual. Throw in a couple of beers at the pub on the way home every evening for guaranteed weight gain. Added to that – I’m more stressed than I’ve ever been. I’ve decided - something’s got to change and I’m going back on the Mindless Eating wagon for good. (Though irritatingly I have left the Mindless Eating book back in London in one of the many black bags.) I’m also considering giving up alcohol - but as anyone who is recently married will tell you, combine weight gain with an alcohol ban and you’ll need to broadcast to the world some sign that you’re not pregnant.

Back in London I’m starting to feel the pinch of the credit crunch as well as my waist band. Seems the bad luck sees no signs of abating and I curse the amount of money I spent in NY on crystals and macchiatos. Our mortgage has gone up (hasn’t everyone’s?), and it’s taking forever to get a new one. If I’d had my third eye open sooner I might have seen this coming! As it is, we’re being forced to rent our Shoreditch flat to some Brazilians and are going to rent something much cheaper in a boring area with no bars, bad restaurants, wedged behind rattling railway lines.

The stress of packing and mortgage negotiations is all too much and yesterday I found myself in a street behind Liverpool street station doubled over having a panic attack – or possible heart attack – I’m not sure which. This is no way to live. Every night Charlie and I are eat takeaways from Tas Firin and go for hurried wheat beers at The Redchurch to write lists. The only Mindless Eating dictate I’m sticking to these days is eating from tiny plates - but when you’re eating lamb shish wraps and piles of baklava it doesn’t really work. (Maybe it wasn’t a panic attack, maybe it was simply indigestion…)

Today I’m still feeling a bit weird after my visit to Marie the psychic, plus my hangover is making me paranoid so I pop into another psychic booth round the corner from my hotel. Sandra tells me that on a scale of 1 to 10 my depleted aura is at level 4. She says my third eye is clammed shut, and I need to meditate every day whilst using an amethyst crystal. She sells me one for 30 dollars.

Later I find the exact same crystal in Chinatown for 6 dollars so buy another three, plus two quartz crystals for good luck. In the next few days I’ve decided I’m going to open my third eye chakra and cast out this bad luck - come what may!

Feeling a bit low and a bit anxious (could be due to mortgage trouble back home in London – but probably more to do with the five macchiatos), at 4.45 I walk past a psychic booth. The sign on the door says ‘Open’. It’s a sign.

Now generally, I’m of the opinion that going to see a psychic is like going to see a therapist. You pay them a few quid and you get to talk about yourself for an hour. If you’re lucky you glean a few insights and enjoy the chat, and if you’re not, you come away feeling faintly unsatisfied, but with no real harm done. If you’re super lucky the psychic tells you something you didn’t know, and gives you a lovely plausible message from your Grandmother.

So when I step into Marie’s booth I’m expecting a nice, cosy chat at the very least. Not so. Marie tells me I only have one year to realise my creative potential otherwise it will be too late! She says I need to live near water to be happy and then she looks piercingly into my eyes and tells me I’m an old soul with negative karma from a previous life which is now giving me bad luck! Marie suggests that I’ll never be successful until she takes me through a cleansing process to change my luck. Afterwards, I need another macchiato to ponder her psychic observations and by this time I’m feeling so edgy that there’s nothing else to do but go back and confront her.

‘I was just about to shut up shop’ she says. ‘It’s meant to be that you came back to find me.’

I ask her if she really believes that I have bad luck, or if it’s just a sales tactic to sell me the cleansing?

‘Come back when you’re ready,’ she says, smiling beatifically so I apologise and ask her to tell me more about the cleansing. One should never antagonise a woman who holds your future in her well- manicured hands.

She stares at me with those piercing blue eyes again and says emphatically ‘you have bad’ pause ‘luck. You work hard and you never get anywhere because of your bad’ pause ‘luck. But I can go into a trance and find out where and when you got the bad luck, and teach you how to get rid of it, whether by meditation or by crystals’!

I ask how much this process will cost. ‘300 dollars’ she tells me.

I make my excuses and leave feeling more than faintly dissatisfied, in fact I’m downright rattled.

Later that night I find an awful lot of asparagus risotto comforting in gluten free heaven.

Usually I quite like going to America, not just for the shopping and the sights but because at least most Americans are a bit chubbier than me. This is not the case in Manhattan. (I guess they have to be skinny, there’s so many of them crammed into such a small space. If everyone suddenly gained an extra inch round the middle people would start popping out of New York like corn from a pan.)

Manhattanites are usually either at work or working out. And when they’re not jogging around Central Park, they’re talking about Real Estate. On my last trip I overheard this in Soho: “you know that flat in Tribeca I bought for 28,000 nine years ago? Guess what, I just sold it for 3 million”
They’re obsessed with real estate because there isn’t any. They hanker after it, become obsessed by it and then binge. It’s exactly the same way that they’re obsessed with food. In fact, they’re so utterly obsessed with food on that island that there are almost ten thousand restaurants and cafes on Manhattan alone.

In this environment – read- a city saturated with gorgeous food, all cheap because of the weak dollar - it’s hard to stick to the teachings of mindless eating and my new found strategies somehow fail to help me as soon as I leave the routine of home. In addition I’m here to work but the job has fallen through (who knew it was so hard to get an Access All Areas pass to New Jersey Women’s High Security Prison?) so I’m just hanging out for a few days – catching up with friends.
This is dangerous. Maybe I’m unimaginative, but I’m passing my time by shopping and eating. The shopping, by the way, is not going well - I find myself unable to fit into any of the clothes in the boutique shops in Soho and the West Village - they are clearly intended for svelte, morning-jogging, star-jumping, squat-thrusting Manhattanites, not me. The eating however is going too well. I graze all day long. If you pass a cute little café in Greenwich village called ‘Once Upon a Tart’ it’s clearly impossible not to pop in and have a Madeline with a macchiatto - even at 11.00am, and when you’ve just had a croissant and a coffee at Pain Quotidien.

In Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink speaks of the danger of ‘visual cues’ that prompt us to eat - and Manhattan is just one great big visual eating cue. It’s like the house made of sweets in Hansel and Gretel. At lunch, I’m seduced by the ‘visual cue’ of the Zagat guide sign in the window of Tomoe Sushi in Greenwich village and like a robot am somehow compelled to march in and order a large( yet incredibly good value) sushi selection - even though I’m not hungry. Well, at least it’s low fat.

That evening my friend chooses an eatery known for its pizzas just next to the Lincoln Centre as we’re seeing an opera there.

One guy dominates the whole restaurant shouting at his date about how he adores his steak black on the outside, blue on the other. ‘Do you like chicken on the bone?’ he yells at her ‘No,’ she replies - he proceeds to tell her the best places to get chicken on the bone in NYC.

Wansink tells us to stop eating by listening to our internal cues, but the terrible thing is I’m still munching on my pizza and I just can’t locate my internal cues. ‘Am I full yet?’ I ask myself ‘Do I need to stop eating this extremely large pepperoni pizza?’ Before I discovered the answer I’ve finished the pizza. The carbophobia I developed before my wedding has evaporated.

At the Metropolitan Opera house where we see Satyagraha by Philip Glass, I see Lucy Liu sitting across the aisle next to an arty looking man with a beard who’s dressed entirely in black. When the lights go up and she stands to applaud I notice she doesn’t look as if she eats too much pepperoni pizza, in fact she doesn’t look like she’s ever even whiffed a pizza in her life.

On the way home, we pass a Pinkberry frozen yoghurt parlour… I’m not sure, but I think I’m still full from the pizza. Or am I? I squeeze my midriff - Yes, I am.

There comes a time when a girl gets sick of dieting and seeks an alternative. Usually it’s a Tuesday. I’ve literally spent whole years of my life dieting and it’s no way to live.

I’ve zoned, food combined, and blood typed myself silly, I’ve done lo-GI, no-GI, hi-GI, till my head spun and I collapsed giddy into an ocean of cabbage soup.

When you’re dieting you don’t think of anything much, you’re aware of one thing only - that you’re hungry. Having said that, not dieting doesn’t suit me - I’ve gained a solid two stone since my wedding last October. “You must be happy” my husband says. Perhaps too happy.

Thank God, Dr Brain Wansink, the enthusiastic high-powered author of Mindless Eating (he’s setting the new dietary guidelines for the States) has offered to help me. He believes I’m trapped in the ‘mindless margin’ - that swathe of food you munch through without even realising it. It’s those leftovers you eat standing up in front of the fridge; the kettle chips you chomp through in front of the TV and the biscuits you eat absentmindedly whilst gazing at the computer screen. I’ve developed compelling habitual eating patterns that I simply can’t break out of and the best thing about it is, that it’s not my fault! Habits are so strong that we cannot change them by willpower alone - we need to employ cunning strategies to trick our mind out of them. Wansink tells me that the only way to break free of my bad habits is to substitute them for good habits - however tiny. I’m substituting three habits a month and I can lose up to a pound a week - mindlessly. Once those three habits are embedded - which takes around a month - you then add another three until you’re magically controlled by mesh of good habits, instead of bad.

From now on I’m always going to eat off small plates, drink out of tall thin glasses and never serve my food from serving dishes on the table (I’ll leave the pans on the stove). I cannot believe these tiny tweaks will reverse my exponential weight gain- but I’m a desperate woman, and I’ll give anything a try.

Now excuse me while I go and eat a steak sandwich off a side plate and drink a pint of wheat beer from a thimble.