Ok, forget yoga and tai chi guaranteeing that you live forever with
the body of a Greek God and the brain of Einstein. It don’t work. Not
today, apparently. No matter how many ‘warrior’ poses you perform, how
long you spend in ‘downward dog’, you’re gonna be a fat bastard but
without the wherewithal to realise it.

Because that was last week’s news. This week its all changed. Must be
evolutionary. Surely they couldn’t have got it all so tragically wrong
in the past?? 10,000 steps a day (Mel counts every single one) means
less than NOTHING in the post-July-9th world. Now you need work outs.
Proper, muscly, sweating in a stinking gym, dumbbell, push-ups type
work out. 12 times a week for 17 hours. Real work. Ya lazy bast…

Apparently from 35 years old we start to lose muscle. Well, you do,
I’m fine, so by mid-50s you need to be working on that. Yoga and
pilates and tai chi are fine but just not enough, which is completely
unsurprising really. Lying on a mat saying ‘ommmmmm’ for 45 minutes
actually DOESN’T cause weight loss or improve muscle tone. Who’d’a
known? And you lose 90 grams of muscle a week/day/month (can’t
remember). So you wake up on a Friday and you’ve only got one tricep.
Bummer. And then you metabolise differently which further increases…
everything bad and horrible. So to combat this terrible decline, you
need hard work.

But, and thank the Lord for always being a ‘but’, if you are a
gymaphobe, like me, then there’s a kind of ‘light’ version that
doesn’t involve sweating in smelly places with too many lycra-clad
sweaty gits. Because ‘a brisk walk for 11 minutes twice a day’ will do
for a start. So I’m fine, I walk for at least 30 minutes on my daily
return commute and I only ever do ‘brisk’. I elevate ‘brisk’ in fact
to ‘GET OUT MY FUCKING WAY YOU SLOVENLY GIT!!!!’ And if you carry
‘heavy shopping’ that counts as muscle work for the over 40s, which is
almost as sad as it is unbelievable. Gardening counts, not that I’m
very keen, but I do mow the lawn. Which does 2 things, it makes me
sweat and makes me drink. Beer, JD & coke, things like that.

Alternatively, the path to true happiness (unless you’re Boris Johnson
who is not only a fat git but destined for HELL) is to watch football,
eat pizza, drink lager. How could anything that feels so good be
anything but?

Happy healthy Tuesday

A xxxx