Step Up To The Plate
The rehab-standard 12-step recovery programme may feel restrictive – and that’s sort of the point – but it needn’t be complicated. What’s more, you don’t need be mainlining hard drugs every other evening to make use of it. Here, Brand breaks the steps down into simple actions. Not all may apply to your situation, but used as a blueprint, they can help you kick any harmful habit, from ice cream to alcohol.
in demonising chocolate biscuits, as they of themselves are not the problem. They won’t of their own volition kick down your front door, shine a flashlight in your face as you sleep, drag you from your bed and jam themselves down your throat. The participation of your consciousness is a prerequisite. For some people a chocolate biscuit is a harmless treat. For some a wee drop of rum or saucy nip of smack is a tonic. Heroin will ferry you to crisis more quickly than a Penguin biscuit, but the key point is the function of this external agent in your life.
Number three in the cycle is a temporary numbing, the moment of grateful exhalation and relief, post biscuit, post coital, post gratifying text from the object of your obsession, post whatever it is you’re fixing on.
The fourth point is ‘consequences’. I used to feel awful as a kid after I’d snaffled my way through a week’s worth of biscuits in one absent minded sitting. I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t reproach themselves momentarily after an orgasm achieved in solitude. And after using drugs, when I was coming to the end of my sojourn into substance misuse, this was the only time I could countenance quitting.
Number five is pain and we’re back to the start of the cycle. As Cambridge graduate and author Eckhart Tolle says, “Addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.” Here we see that dissected. As the cycle goes round it gathers momentum, like an out of control carousel, like the spinning of my head when drunk.
The legal age to drink in the UK is 18. By the time I was 19, medical professionals and my college teachers had identified I had a problem and were telling me I needed help. In retrospect it was evident much earlier, in the way I ate, related to people and thought about myself. I wish I could have identified these patterns sooner, so I could’ve begun to apply the methods outlined in this book. For me though, I had to repeat this pattern for 10 years with consequences increasing with each vertiginous whip. I didn’t know there was another way. I was a kid, then I was an addict, and by the time the idea of working a programme had reached me – which with substances means abstinence, and with behaviour and food means structure – I was 27, a heroin addict and in serious trouble.
I might now have kicked the drugs, but the inner struggle still remains. Now, hang on to your hat and grab your pistol of cynicism in preparation to gun me down here, because I’m about to allude to how a recent experience in my mollycoddled life made me feel like I was in a first class penitentiary. On tour in Australia I was travelling in air-locked privilege from plane to car to delightful hotel room, to arena, when I was struck from within by a yearning to escape that I couldn’t ignore. I arrived in Brisbane at a towering and chintzy hotel and was taken to a room that blasted me with immaculate comfort. But when the door closed behind the perfectly friendly guard and I was alone I couldn’t open a window, because, y’know, these buildings are high and it’s dangerous. Presumably due to suicide. You cannot get to air, the air you breathe is packaged and one of the few commodities of our wasteful age that is fastidiously recycled.
Now I hope I’m not trying to dress up a tantrum as an epiphany here, but I felt trapped, that I had no way back to nature. To breathe. To be a human. Suddenly, I felt I had to scramble to have access to natural conditions. In one jarring moment I felt the g-force of the rapid journey from hunter-gatherer to hunted and gathered.
No wonder people hanker after animalism and raw thrills. No wonder people go dogging: hot breath on the windscreen, torch lights and head lights searching, huddled strangers clutching in the dark for the piercing relief of orgasm. No wonder people use porn: hunched over a laptop, grasping and breathless, serious and dutiful like zealous attendants. What are we doing when we’re masturbating? Or swallowing mindless food or swilling silly drinks? Who there do we serve? What is the plan?
The feeling I had in the hotel is real. The need for connection. The feeling I had when I used drugs was real. The feeling you have that there’s ‘something else’ is real, too. What happens when you don’t follow through with the compulsion? What is on the other side of my need to eat and purge? The only way to find out is to not do it, and that is a novel act of faith.
It’s easy, in this age of illusory South American superfruits and dark-web testosterone supps, to presume that performanceenhancers must come at a high price. So you can rejoice in the knowledge that there is a cheap and highly versatile PED already sitting in your kitchen cupboard – bicarbonate of soda.
The consummate utility player, bicarb can whiten teeth, relieve skin irritation, sooth insect bites and even restore lustre to your silver cufflinks. And now we have a fresh entry to its lengthy list of accomplishments. A review by the University of Copenhagen rated it against other popular fitnessboosters such as nitrates and beta-alanine, and found bicarb outpaced both for slashing times in endurance sports. A single 20g dose, taken 90 minutes before exercise, is enough to buffer the production of lactic acid, reducing the burn in your muscles and helping you push harder for longer.
Which means a slice or three of your signature sponge will see your stamina rise along with it. Alternatively, try dissolving two teaspoons in your race-day water bottle. And should you then use it to wash down a wedge of said cake, more power to you.