I predict a diet

Now that Christmas is over and another New Year greets us, the majority of the population will be wasting time coming up with pointless New Year’s resolutions. I have only ever made one New Year’s resolution and that was back in 1995. It was to not make New Year’s resolutions because they are pointless. I’ve stuck to it religiously ever since.

Of course most people will have made it their New Year’s resolution to lose weight. This is usually the most common one because everybody uses Christmas as an excuse to eat like an American for two weeks.

The trouble is that most people think they will lose weight just by talking about it. They don’t realise that to see any significant change takes a lot of time and effort. It also takes a great deal of will power. Also, people expect to lose weight over night and get frustrated when they don’t see any results after one day and give up.

Some people decide to start small and go for a brisk walk every day but what they actually do is amble at a slug’s pace while they daydream about what life would be like without an overhanging gut. Then they will make excuses to stop doing it by claiming that they are tired from having done it the previous day and need to rest their muscles, or that the weather is either too hot or too cold. People will make excuses not to do proper exercise by claiming that they don’t like running, that swimming is too expensive and they find gyms boring.

Then of course there is the new age of fitness training: The Wii Fit. This makes exercise fun because you can enjoy it with the whole family, there are some entertaining games on it and you basically combine it with playing on the computer. The problem is that anyone who actually believes they will get fit by using the Wii is an idiot. You are more likely to get R.S.I. before you get fit. That is if you don’t smash your television screen with the remote first when it flies out of your hand during a game of tennis.

People have asked me in the past things like what exercises they should do and what food they should eat and whether I could help them in some way. This is because I’m known for doing silly amounts of exercise and basically eating rabbit food. Whilst I know a little bit about the subject, I’m hardly a personal trainer. Nor am I a nutritionist.

The basic principle is quite straight forward: Eat less and exercise more. If you are burning off more calories than you intake, logic suggests that you will lose weight. A simple enough concept but in reality it’s a lot more difficult.

The basic problem is that people don’t actually know what a calorie is. They assume a calorie is fat. That’s what annoys me about these stupid labels that have to appear on all food packages now by law. They give the number of calories and tell you what percentage of your daily recommended allowance that is. But a recommended allowance for whom? A fat man? A fat woman? An adult? A child? A midget? An American?

A calorie is simply a measurement of energy. It comes in different forms; sugars, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, saturates. It’s how the energy is distributed around the body by these different nutrients that is important, not the calorie itself. I personally have a high carbohydrate diet because I mainly do endurance work and that burns energy at a slower rate. That’s why I’m so skinny and it’s also why my heart rate is slow enough for an old girlfriend to once ask me if I was in fact dead.

If I stopped doing endurance training but kept the same diet I’d get fat. It’s the same principle with body builders. They have a high protein diet because that provides short burst of energy that are prime for building tissue. Once they stop lifting heavy objects for a living their muscle is quickly replaced by lard.

For the average person, a sudden change in diet will only cause problems. This is what is wrong with these idiotic crash diets. The body struggles to cope with such dramatic changes and tires quickly. This makes people feel both unwell and also gives them cravings so they end up snacking.

Snacking is a big problem for most people. They will claim that they are still putting on weight even though they have cut down on what they eat but they either don’t realise they are snacking to make up for it or just refuse to admit it. Or to put it another way, they lie.

There will be more calories and certainly more saturated fats in a bar of chocolate than in a piece of fruit twice the size. People assume that because they are snacking on something small it is okay but what they don’t realise is that it’s those cheeky little chocolate bars that pile on the pounds.

Despite all these health warnings and government mandates to reduce obesity in this country, the problem lies with shops and supermarkets. For example, a few months ago I went into my local supermarket to buy two carrots and a leak (I’m pretty sure I was planning on eating them with something else). On my way to the checkout I decided to be a fatty and have a pizza for dinner instead. The pizza was about half the price of the vegetables. The pizza contained about a million percent of my daily recommended allowance of saturated fats. So basically the message there is that if you want to save money during this recession, eat crap and get fat.

Surely the answer would be to reduce the cost of fruit and veg and put a fatty tax on junk food. This might go some way to convincing people to start eating more healthily. If not, it will surely earn the government more money in tax to help get us out of this financial mess we are in, assuming – possibly naively – that they don’t use that money to claim expenses for moat cleaning and rent boys.