Diminishing towards the horizon

Twas the season to be jolly, fat. Christmas and new year are now done but the unholy alliance that is the fat pumping and draining industries are still occupied with their pendulum assault on our bodies. The fat pumpers are anticipating Easter but until then it is the turn of the drainers who will attempt to sell us remedies for our last bout of gourmandism. Binge then purge then binge then purge. Despite being a multi billion pound industry dieting doesn’t work, can’t work, sorry, but it’s not like you didn’t know. Diets don’t work because they don’t last, you will do it until you don’t. Mostly you will get bored, or lose a little weight, but that is hardly surprising, you would lose weight if all you did was return to your pre-Christmas diet, and here you are surviving on the smell of a carrot stick or the lick of a steak. Another reason diets don’t work is because they’re not meant to, if they did the entire diet industry would collapse, it would be as if Exxon invented a perpetual engine. Diets are like trousers, they are a fashion item, that make you look good in trousers. They are often deliberately faddy, deliberately absurd, if you miss this diet another will be along in five minutes. You won’t stick with that one either because you are human, and humans are fickle. It is up to you and you alone to maintain a healthy lifestyle, it is up to you to decide what that is and to come to terms with who you are and please bear in mind that the thing that happens while you are unhappy with the way you look, is your life.

Perhaps you should join a gym, gyms can work, under certain circumstances. I should know, I have been going to a gym three times a week for about forty years, this is not virtuous, well perhaps once it was, now I do it because I like to eat a full English breakfast and drink a little too much beer every Friday. Looking good is a fringe benefit. Two things I have have learned though from training for so long; one, you must train forever, two; personal trainers, though very nice people, are surplus to requirement, unless you are Angelina Jolie, who I believe travels with three personal trainers in a portmanteau. The problem as always, is constancy, in the short term a trainer will flatter and exhort you, they will tell what a good job you are doing, how you are improving and for a short time it will be true, but then you will become friends and your sessions will descend into chats interspersed with a little bit of half-hearted exercise before descending further into something akin to an hour in a coffee shop, without the coffee, or the coffee shop. Eventually you will realise that your trainer is little more than an expensive gym buddy and is seeing other people anyway and you will suggest a break and very soon any good you think you’ve achieved will fade away and you will be back where you started, going to the gym solo once a month, catching unflattering glimpses of yourself in the cruel mirrors, until your membership runs out or the following January when you and your PT might get back together for another try. It’s not just you of course, gyms can be pretty sobering places for everybody, in all the years that I have been training, twelve years at my current gym, I can not think of a single member who looks any better now than when they started, they don’t look any worse either and that is the point. Actually come to think of it Neil looks better, but he is an anomaly, or an alien.

I know none of this sounds particularly encouraging but that just means you should probably lower your expectations, or at the very least adjust them. Going to the gym should not be about changing your shape it should be about maintaining it, you are exercising not body building, just as a good diet shouldn’t make you lose weight, that would be a bad diet. A good diet maintains your weight, unless you need to take some off first, in which case it should simply return you to a healthy weight and then maintain it, and while we are on the subject of diet, you can’t detoxify yourself either because you aren’t toxic, if you were you would be seriously ill or dead. Have faith in common sense, all you need is a simple plan, a routine, one you work out for yourself that covers everything. Okay, not so simple but balance as always is the key, everything in moderation, even moderation, treats are good for you, cake is good for you, full English breakfasts are good for you, so long as you stick to the plan. Life is short but the living is long, it is life’s greatest secret, we diminish towards the horizon, everything is forever and you can never stop. It is the reason that crime doesn’t pay despite the fact that it obviously does, it just doesn’t pay regularly, and no matter how many times we tell ourselves it isn’t so, life is regular. So throw away the diet book, stop wishing you looked like a celery thin celebrity, don’t hire a personal trainer, don’t abdicate your responsibility. So what if you are carrying a few extra pounds? You earnt them, you own them, now they are yours to lose.