Talk to the Body

There’s nothing much worse than a cliché that becomes horribly true at your expense. Thus, I have came to the realisation that now I am officially an old bastard in my early 30s, I cannot get away with my dubious dietary and lifestyle habits anymore without some payback. The warranty on my body has expired and, as is the way, it's beginning to fall apart.

As things are, I feel like I’m at a point where I could easily go down the slippery road that leads to the one place I swore I’d never go – that of being a fat bastard. The signs are there: I’m around 20 pounds heavier than I was a couple of years ago, and indicators would show a lot of that is in the belly area. It’s not too surprising either, given for the last eight years or so my nutritional needs have been met by plenty of breakfast cereal, cheese sandwiches and pizza washed down by beer.

It’s not like I've not been warned either. A couple of years ago, I was invited to go play some five-a-side football by a work colleague. Despite my love of the game, I’d not played it in any form outside Playstation for the best part of a decade. Too much running around for this trooper. But this would be playing alongside a bunch of lads in their mid 40s, so I reckoned it would be a leisurely kickaround that even one as slow as I could keep pace with.

As they say, how wrong can you be? In minutes I was wheezing like a mono-lunged asthmatic who’d just been forced to run up a hillside, hiding my shame by offering to play in goal for the rest of proceedings. Did I learn? Did I fuck. Once the aches had subsided (which turned out to be several days later), I elected to keep any notions of exercise as far from my mind as psychologically possible.

Until recently, when getting my sorry arse into a pair of jeans with a 32 inch waist has become a wee bit of a squeeze. You wonder "how the hell did that happen? I was the guy who could shovel nothing but Pringles, Mars Bars and fizzy pop down his gob all day and suffer only shite skin in retribution!" I can deal with the grey hairs, wrinkles and creaking knees, but the idea of having even a tiny bilge tank peaking out of my shirt is beyond unacceptable.

Vanity? Of course, but we all have a bit of that, unless you’re the bod sleeping in a puddle of your own Diamond White-tinged piss in a park somewhere. Thus, a line is to be drawn in the sand – the 32nd year of my life, things have to change.

Not that I’m going to be hitting the gym, you understand. No chance. I visited one, once, and found it one of the most terrifying places I could imagine. My own personal Room 101. I've no ambitions to get in “shape” or be able to run more than 100 yards without needing a bit of a lie down. With luck, all it’ll need is a few ten minute bursts of basic exercise a day and knocking certain beverages on the head outside weekends.

Basically, do the absolute minimum to get by. Why change the habits of a lifetime? Not until my second heart attack, at least.