In this, the most glowering month of the year, we all need a guru, and I have found mine. He is a one-time bodybuilder, turned action movie hero, turned (soft) Republican politician and his name is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
At the very end of last year Arnie took to a site which, because I’m an old nostalgic who thinks names should have more than one letter, I like to call Twitter. He said he had been told that lists go viral, so he had written one. The first piece of advice was: “You should mostly eat food you know is healthy. There is no magic food.”
And the second? That was: “You should also occasionally let yourself eat delicious food you know isn’t healthy. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Oh, Arnie, you bloody diamond. This, as I believe they say on social media. This, a thousand times. Because how we live is never binary, even if the season we are living through tells us otherwise.
In the run-up to Christmas we were implored to indulge ourselves. Have a lot of what you fancy. Go face down in the sugar and the saturated fats. Then, the moment it was over, the message switched. It’s a new year, you disgusting, shameless slob. Look at what you’ve done to yourself. Get a grip. Do something. Do something now.
Or don’t. Just be you, a work in progress, forever tacking into the fierce winds of life, in an attempt to get to where you want to be. As Arnie says, there are no magic foods. The greengrocer is not a pharmacy, whatever the snake-oil merchants with their £5-a-month subscription online newsletters might tell you. You cannot boost your immune system by juicing a cucumber and the fact you haven’t caught Covid in the past year doesn’t mean you have unlocked some secret of epidemiology that has escaped the entire medical profession. It just means you haven’t caught Covid.
It also probably means that you are an affluent member of the middle classes who already eats a pretty balanced diet because you can afford to do so. This is one of the most infuriating qualities of those who fetishise their diet as though it were the secret to leading a better life than yours; the ones who bang on about being a big fan of the total cobblers that is “wellness” when no one has ever said: “Actually, I’m really into ‘illness’.”
It is a stone-cold certainty, for example, that the people who shell out for the new M&S Gut Shot, apparently boasting more live culture than the Southbank Centre, will not be the ones GPs are worried about. They will be the worried well, people who already take care of themselves and who have no need whatsoever for something they could get from eating a dollop of live yoghurt and a few nuts. Which they almost certainly do already.
At which point there’s an outbreak of heckling from the cheap seats: shut it, lardarse. I saw you on TV recently. Maybe you could do with considering your life choices.
And in a way they’re right, because like any reasonable human being, I consider my life choices all the time. There has never been a thin version of me. I have always been this.
So I do what feels right. I go to the gym a lot. Sometimes I eat fish. There are nuts in my cupboard, and there’s yoghurt in my fridge. And sometimes, just sometimes, I eat chips. Which are delicious, even if they’re not healthy. Because otherwise, what’s the bloody point? Just ask Arnie.
