The Hungry Years: confessions of a food addict William Leith Bloomsbury, 296pp, £10.99 ISBN 074757250X

This book is said (by its press release, admittedly) to "defy categorisation - part memoir, part diet book, part comedy and part sugar rush". As a diet book, it approaches its science (the miracle of the Atkins diet) with fizzing, big-hearted polemic. As a memoir and as comedy, it succeeds beautifully. As a sugar rush, it is definitely compulsive, though not nauseating, which I suppose would put it at the Green & Black's end of confectionery. As a confessional, it is pretty much a masterclass - frank, tough-minded, funny, generous and not so self-involved that it cannot, interestingly and at length, branch into matters beyond its hero and his tum.

I read it, by coincidence, right on the back of Judith Moore's Fat Girl, also a memoir, also about overeating, also brilliant. Read side by side, these books illuminate just how much the genders have dovetailed in the matter of corpulence, how unisex our body-image concerns now are - indeed, how unisex they must always have been, at their furthest reaches, because true bingeing has nothing to do with cellulite, sex appeal and trying to fit into pretty underwear. True doughnut excess is a compulsion like any other, except that compulsive eaters seem to have a more advanced sense of self-parody than alcoholics and junkies; they display less self-pity. When they're funny, they're funnier, and when they are tragic they are more poignant, as they know they are supposed to be keeping things light. Food addicts are, after all, already so heavy. Leith and Moore are the map-makers of modern obesity. I honestly don't think anyone will ever again need to write a book about lard.

In the end, The Hungry Years succeeds not because of its frankness, or its insights into ketosis (the nirvana of Atkins, when the body starts burning calories pretty much for the hell of it), or its selected thoughts on Roland Barthes, but because of the quality of the writing. The pages are littered with the neatest, most tickling observations - "The sandwich practically fell down my throat; it was like dropping a billiard ball down a well." Leith often veers into this idiosyncratic, tumbling literary style: ". . . and we take her new puppy for a walk in the small hours, and when we get back the puppy bites me with its needly teeth, but I don't mind, because I'm not sober, and I'm not sober when I walk out into the night, and I'm not sober when my plane takes off the next day, and I'm not sober when it lands". It becomes increasingly moving as the book progresses, the way these painfully adult concerns are told with the intensity and unaffected charm of a seven-year-old trying to show you a badger.

Besides this, The Hungry Years has an ideological purpose, a number of points to make beyond self-examination. The first is that the Atkins diet really works, and the reason we are not told this is that stodge manufacturers have a vested interest in keeping it from us. In the US, flour companies give money to Harvard; fast-food outlets lobby senators. I buy the bit about Atkins working: all meaningful criticisms of this diet have been made by people who found it impossible to stick to it, or who read the book wrongly and ended up with scurvy. The fact is, it does work; it just leaves its adherents feeling a bit, you know, egg-bound.

The second idea - that governments ignore it because they're in hock to the carbohydrate industry - I don't quite buy. The sugar market is no less powerful than the flour industry, yet it does not stop anyone counselling against sugar. Moreover, capitalists are inventive, and like noth-ing more than a demand for a new thing altoge- ther: a low-carbohydrate baguette is an opportunity in itself. I suspect that it just suits state institutions to be sluggish about embracing new ideas. A celebrity wants weight-loss results right now; a government doesn't want to preach anything that might make it look daft in 20 years. Still, Leith argues this point manfully, and left me three-quarters convinced.

His more important theory is that every feature of modern life is designed specifically to make us want more of it. Painkillers, carbohydrates, cocaine, pornography, consumption in general: all leave a void, rather than satiate. Capitalism can survive only by creating false needs, and the more we embrace it, the more refined the triggers for these needs become. I find myself deeply unsurprised that Leith is a fan of Jean Baudrillard, although, if that sounds catty, I should add that his description of interviewing the philosopher was so tense and textured that I reworked it that night as my very own anxiety dream. The truth is, these ideas will be familiar to any child of any semi-hippie parent; their exposition here does not make them any newer, but it does make them feel truer.

Anyway, Leith had some therapy; he stopped eating all the time; he found a girlfriend who wasn't horrible to him (the early girlfriends are outlandishly mean). You feel glad in your heart for him, as if he were a close friend. And yet, not wishing to underplay his misery, for this book, his suffering was worth it.

Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian

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