New Year's Resolutions - 7 January 1994

And warm good wishes for a Happy New Year wherever you are or - quickly remembering my political correctness - perhaps I should say wherever 1st January is the beginning of your New Year.

Every New Year's Eve there's a scene in New York's Times Square that's been going on for ever and one that's now watched by Americans across the country who are respectively an hour behind New York or two hours, on the coast three hours. Here I've dug out a description of the scene a year or two ago, which describes not only New York's famous ball of light, but records what used to be a compulsory chore for journalists, a sampling of the commonest New Year's resolutions. Here it is.

"The clocks struck the hour and the great ball of 450 incandescent bulbs glowed and then fell from the mast head of the Times building in New York City. Not long after first light tomorrow regiments of women would be out invading the January sales rustling among tidal waves of silk crpe de Chine, picking up bargains in Albatross boudoir jackets and non-bargains in French silk stockings. All across the country, men would renew the usual annual resolutions to stay away from the pool room, to learn hypnotism, to buy a Madelette, no plates, no films, no fuss, picture taken and finished on the spot in less than a minute, to abandon what they call the drink habit, to learn shorthand in 30 days, to buy a wireless practise set in order to learn the Morse code, to invest in a John Deere plough, to take one of those correspondence school courses and earn more money. I tell you what's holding you down, Jim, best of all the most widespread of all American resolutions of the time to get fat, which is what all the advertisements promised, let us make you fat. At our own risk we offer to put 10, 15, yes 30 pounds of good solid stay-there flesh on your bones."

Well, you must have already been brought up short by the all American resolutions of the time, of what time? Of New Year's Day 1915 - that's what I was describing. Of all those quaint resolutions I think there's probably only one that still stands, the admirable sad determination probably due to fail to give up the drink habit. I discovered, by the way, that by the end of this year, it will have been just 60 years since two American men, drinking buddies, took a pledge to shake the habit; the important thing about their pledge was that they took it together and had a new idea about how to keep it. If either of them as the weeks and months of their abstinence went along, if either of them felt himself slipping or aching for a drink, he was call to the other who promised to arrive at once like a nurse and see his pal through, as they say, through it the throes of temptation.

The man who had this idea was known until he died as Bill W. He hoped to recruit others, many others into this routine and he promised to do it on the understanding that their identity would never be published, they would be anonymous that was the beginning in 1935 of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Now at that time in this country, I remember in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University had a pioneering department of so-called alcoholic studies; it was run by a psychiatrist and both before and after it was the educated consensus that an alcoholic's best hope of cure was through psychiatric treatment. I suppose Europe too had its clinics, it certainly shared the general presumption about the value of psychiatry. I knew the man who was in charge at Yale and after a few years he confessed that while their studies could detail symptoms and the clinical course of the disease and could elaborate theories about causes, well he was an honest man and admitted they were producing no cures. Soon afterwards, he shut up shop.

Of course, all the psychiatrists had heard of Alcoholics Anonymous and its methods and it's fair to say that at that time among most double-domed psychiatrists AA was derided as a rather maudlin method, a sentimental routine. Bill W at once admitted as much, he nailed the psychiatrists, the Freudians especially on their own ground with their favourite doctrine, that most deep human impulses are childlike and that chronic drunkenness has much to do with the protest against a lack of affection. Well, said Bill W, we make it up to them, we give it to them at the moment they most need it.

Very soon, I should say by the 1950s, psychiatrists no longer claimed to be able to cure alcoholism and grudgingly admitted that AA worked as it does and has gone on doing. There was at the time, one famous intellectual who might, you might have guessed would be certain to back the psychiatrists and despise AA as rather vulgar stuff but, no, he saw it working from the start on good friends and when Bill W died and his identity was revealed as William "Bill" Wilson all of us actually called him the greatest social architect of our time.

Among all the other resolutions, I don't suppose anybody today is vowing to learn shorthand in 30 days or 30 years or learn the Morse code but the one resolution I'm positive no American swore to in the waning hours of 1993 was the last one I noted, "we promise we can make you fat with good stay-there flesh on your bones". Heavens to Betsy.

When I came on that 1915 advertisement, I turned the page and faced an accompanying illustration. I'm looking at it now, it shows a handsome muscular man sitting tailor fashion on the beach beside what was then called a deep bosomed fine figure of a woman, say 160 pounds, 11-12 stone, they were both wearing what were known as bathing costumes. She's looking over to him and pointing to two skeletons up the beach. Today, they'd look normal enough and she's saying "gee look at that pair of skinny scarecrows, why don't they try and then the brand name of the stuff that came in box costing 50¢, first box free, if you didn't gain 10 pounds in the first week or two, money back". Don't you wonder what it could possibly be? All it says in the fine print blurb is that this treatment increases the red corpuscles in the blood, strengthens the nerves and puts the digestive tract into such shape that food is assimilated, imagine and turned into good solid healthy flesh.

Today, the ad would more likely echo Hamlet and show you how this too too solid flesh could be made to melt. That ad and that dieting mania was published as I say in 1915. Ten years later, certainly by the mid '20s, the ideal female figure in Britain as well as America had changed dramatically. I never know who dictates these things, I suppose the fashion designers in order to stay solvent have to change the ideal shape drastically at regular intervals so that you can't just take in a tuck or two, you have to buy completely new clothes.

Well, by 1925, it was decreed that the deep bosomed woman should not only loose her depth, she should have no bosom at all and take off at the very least those 30 pounds her mother had put on. And so in that curious absolutely dependable way that life imitates art everywhere suddenly young women of all classes except the very poor and the very old and rich had flat chests, short skirts above legs without calves, bobbed hair and were in 10 years more radically different looking from their mothers than any two generations have been since.

Shortly after the First War was over, a word came into the language and a dieting practice that swept Britain. The practice but not the word did the same in the United States, it was Banting. I used to think this probably derived from the Canadian doctor Frederick Banting who discovered co-discovered insulin, but no. Mr Banting was a London cabinet maker who came to fame rather late in life. By the 1920s he was crowding 60, he had a theory how to take off that stay there fat, how in fact to slim, avoid all fats, starches and sugar hence "to bant" became the fashion first with society women and very soon with all women and ever since dieting has meant taking flesh off not putting it on to stay there.

There was a report, however, a so-called survey came out last weekend announcing a new trend called pleasure revenge, a fad for defying all the good rules we've learned through the years about cigarettes, caffeine, fatty foods. This defiance takes the form of choosing high-fat snacks, of putting on a couple of pounds instead of losing 10. And who conducted this survey? A marketing vice president and a professor of psychology whose specialty is studying New Year's resolutions. He finds that neither losing weight nor stopping smoking was the number one resolution among, he says, a lot of people; he doesn't say how many over how many years they were studied. In fact, the last thing that's indicated by this so-called survey is a scientific study; the professor calls the movement a backlash against the last decade's relentless beating of the health drum. Don't believe it. It says here, quote, "representatives of the dairy, beef, pork, sugar, snack food, fast food and tobacco industries view the recent survey with enthusiasm". You can believe that.

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