One month into 2013, and all of my New Year’s resolutions
are now only endings to the sentence “In an ideal world...”, but for one. Body sodden with alcohol and mind sodden with
drunken ambition, on New Year’s Eve I decided that this would be a year of
attempted self-improvement. This
would be when I would ‘get healthy’; years of routinely packing away Oreos
before nestling into my own arse-shaped imprint in the sofa would eventually
take its toll, I thought to myself.
Fruit and veg. had never been my favourite duo – for
starters, settling down after a night-out to a bowl of guavas and watching Countryfile on Sky+ has never really appealed to me. I think it stems further back
though, from childhood.
I have vivid memories as a child of being engrossed in
episodes of Recess on ITV – Spinelli got in some serious shit
with The Ashleys, Vince was being awesome at everything and King Bob was just being
a straight-up dick – only for my focus to be interrupted by an onslaught of
adverts promoting ‘healthy eating’. ‘Healthy eating’, what was this?
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I had no opinions on the adverts themselves. In fact, I didn't mind some of them – they provided a welcome break from the stress of children’s
television. However, I did decide was that some of them scared the life out of
me. You say you want seven year-old me
to eat leeks? Then maybe you should ditch the 6-foot talking leek, beady-eyed
with terror – presumably as a result of drugs. They didn’t make me want to eat
vegetables; they made want to destroy every living plant known to man before
they rose up from the ground and started abducting children.
Fruit and veg. wasn't the only problem. I’d actively avoid
fibre – being force-fed All-Bran like a prize-pig at your grandparent’s house
for ten years tends to have that effect. (Let me stress: I love my
grandparents.)
Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating – when am I not? – but I
survived twenty years without ‘healthy eating’. It would be a hard habit to
kick; I needed a plan of attack. Rather optimistically, I aimed to get my
five-a-day, take multivitamins, jog once a week and drink only water where I
could. The latter two went out the window when I realised they required effort,
but the former two are still going strong.
It’s odd: you can spend your life without being
introspective about how healthy your lifestyle is, but any attempt at change
reveals any shortcomings. And this is me; one month into my laissez-faire
health-kick I feel an awful lot better within myself, now I’m not so scared
that my change will be in vain. Vegetables aren’t stoners anymore and
multivitamins aren't quite the cyanide pills I thought they were.
In Aesop-fable fashion, I've gathered one moral from this story:
everything I have ever thought I had formed a valid opinion on is wrong. Fortunately,
my naivety about my lifestyle was probably the last remnant of my adolescence,
and now I feel like more of my own adult. Shit, suppose I should go get a job
or something then.
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