TWO weeks into a new year and the flow of media encouragement to lose weight and become fitter is easing from flood-level to a river. Give it another fortnight and we will have only a few backwater trickles of advice, easily ignored or diverted, to remind us of what might have been.
Sorry, will be. This year will be different as I heed the wisdom of Alan Titchmarsh – words not usually heard in any sentence by me about the just-too-affable gardener and broadcaster who advised us recently: "Eat less. Exercise more. That's all the
re is to it."
Correct, Alan, so it is. I've given that advice to myself many a time – and most of us know it without being told. Not all, as an attempt to navigate any Saturday morning high street through a mass of pie and pasty eaters, queues at Greggs, full houses at McDonald's, wobbling stomachs and – copyright Bill Bryson – "butts bigger than Idaho" will confirm. But most.
The trouble is not only the willpower needed to start, but the tendency to quit when the results of apparently eating less and exercising more are disappointing.
We've all heard them: "What? A week on cabbage soup and Diet Coke and walking to work and I've only lost half a pound? Full-cream large coffee and two iced doughnuts, please."
But did they stick to the eat less, exercise more rules? "Of course. Well, yes, we had a curry last night. And a pizza the night before. And we haven't quite managed to cut out butter and chocolate. But we have cut back to a bottle of wine a day. And a muesli bar every morning can't be bad. And I did walk to work twice. All right, once."
Not everyone has the stubbornness of my late father-in-law, who lost weight, and possibly friends, rapidly on a diet of dry muesli for breakfast and a whole boiled cauliflower each day for lunch.
A pity he showed the same willpower – he was from Fife – when he became one of the few to force themselves to start smoking again. That was for reasons known only to him, but I suspect it had something to do with increasing Government attempts to get people to stop.
None of which, apart from a demonstration of willpower, albeit perverse, has anything to do with Alan Titchmarsh's advice and my attempt to follow it as we move through January.
It's depressing to feel the belt-buckle tighten when we eat well above the five portions a day of fruit and vegetables, lean meat and fish, rice and pasta, home-made soup and breakfast of porridge. Clearly it's the extras that cause the trouble and coming from a waste not want not, clear your plate background. It makes binning the last of the mince pies rather than eating them difficult. But it was done.
I also thought that I was getting enough exercise through walking and gardening. But clearly as an endomorph – physically strong but pudding-shaped – not enough.
So as well as walking even more and gardening to excess, it's dig out the badminton racquets, find the swimming gear and anyone for country dancing? As long as it's not with Alan Titchmarsh.
The full article contains 554 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
