50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

You may be familiar with Tom Watson, the senior Labour politician in the UK. Indeed you may be familiar with two Tom Watsons, the one that was going around until about a year ago, and the one that we see today, who is seven stones lighter.

The ‘old’ Tom Watson really does seem like a different person to the ‘new’ Tom Watson, who describes himself a reformed sugar addict.

He says that it wasn’t just the refined sugar that was doing the damage, it was the fact that it made him feel hungry all the time. He had been in a state of constant hunger for about 30 years, until he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

And then he took the refined sugar out of his diet, and he stopped being hungry

— he can now be seen at the head of campaigns such as Fizz Free February, which encourage people to give up sugary drinks.

For anyone interested in the nature of addiction, Watson is a kind of a walking exhibit of the changes that can happen if you can free yourself from whatever is dragging you down. When you look at him now, you feel an almost physical sense of empathy with the difficulties which he has faced — and a physical sense of freedom from the burden that he carries no more.

With no other form of addiction do we see such a striking contrast between the former self and the one that is emerging. It is almost like some cartoon of what can happen if you stop doing the wrong things and you start doing the right things.

It looks as if the ‘real’ person has emerged from a body that was not really his own — it is an amazing thing to see.

With other forms of recovery, you can see changes, but they can be more subtle. Alcoholics can lose weight because they are not spending so much time drinking or sitting on barstools, but they can also gain weight because a new thing has entered their lives, a thing called food.

Either way, they will probably look a lot better, a lot healthier, and the same goes for junkies of various kinds, who wouldn’t have been paying much attention to mundane issues of diet and personal appearance — but the contrast will hardly be as obvious as the seven stones in weight that a Tom Watson used to be carrying around, but not any more.

Spiritually, too, your alcoholics will be in a better place, they will feel much better all round, but again you wouldn’t be looking at a picture before and after, and shaking your head in astonishment.

As for gamblers, perhaps the primary trait of the compulsive gambler is inscrutability, the fact that the person who is down a millions dollars will look more or less exactly like the person he used to be — and, indeed, the person he may become in recovery.

In public anyway, the gambler reminds us of that famous poster featuring the many faces of Charles Bronson, all of which are exactly the same. And yet if the addicted gambler, or any other addict, manages to get out of the game alive, the feeling of liberation can be just as striking as the one experienced by Tom Watson, when he stopped pouring all that sugar into himself.

Indeed, Watson should become the poster boy, not just for Fizz Free

February, but for every other campaign which helps you in your struggle to be free, which seeks to illustrate the rewards to be had for giving up the bad stuff.

The drinker or the smoker or the cocaine addict has also been carrying around this weight, not an actual physical burden that can be measured in pounds and ounces, but a weight nonetheless — one that can dominate your existence. And if somehow that weight can be made to fall away, you will feel this sense of lightness that is almost... almost unbearable.

“It wasn’t just the sugar doing the damage, it was the fact that it made him feel hungry all the time”