Mo Fanning - British writer and comic

Diets

Weight loss – simply the BEST

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Best slimming tips

Have you ever stumbled upon a magazine called ‘Best’? You’ll find it in every low-grade supermarket next to the crossword puzzle books. They’re designed to sharpen the mind. ‘Best’ sets out to ruin it.

Reading ‘Best’ is like having your nasty aunty Pat round for tea. It’s sixty pages of fat-shaming, miracle diets and Meghan Markle bitchery, interspersed with motivational stories of women who lost weight by eating tar. Two dry heaves and a dizzy turn later, they’d lost a pound. There’s a problem page. Written by Vanessa Feltz. Who in their right mind takes advice from Vanessa Feltz?

Best having a pop at Meghan again‘Best’ is addictive. I have two settings. Worried for the world and craving cheese, and yet ‘Best’ has me convinced I’ll lose ten pounds in ten days by committing to their good sleep diet. You swig half a pint of Night Nurse before each meal. By the time desert arrives, you’re face-down in a plate of spaghetti.

Most mornings, the man in my mirror looks like something the dog slept on. My body isn’t a temple. It’s a phone … on emergency battery.

Lose weight … change everything

I know I should change my diet. Healthy eating involves more than an ability to refuse doughnuts. We’re talking serious lifestyle changes. Much as I’d like to fit 32-inch jeans, I’m not getting up two hours early each morning to turn a head of cauliflower into couscous for an exciting weekday supper.

I refuse to follow any diet plan where breakfast is two almonds and you get to lick an apple for lunch. You skip dinner to cry at photos of yourself aged 17 in Speedos.

I’ve tried a Fitbit. It was like having the bitchiest of gay best friends on my wrist. Most days, I spend my time counting down the hours until I’m allowed to eat again.

Meditation appealed. I loved being able to call lying down a lifestyle choice. I downloaded a class and put it on, before promptly falling asleep. At three in the morning, I woke starving and ate a whole bag of oven chips. Still frozen.

I’ve become an organ donor. It’s one way to make sure I get to wear slim-fit coffin jeans.

Whatever ‘Best’ wants me or its target market readers to believe, dealing with grief is hard when I can’t even drown my feelings in food.

Get thee to a gym

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Writing and reading - Mo FanningSo this month, I joined a new gym.

And as anyone who’s ever allowed themselves to stray into such a place will know, it isn’t anywhere near as simple as just marching up to a desk, handing over an exorbitant joining fee, then high-tailing it, never to return while each month your bank account haemorrhages money. If it was that simple, we’d all be doing it.

No, first you have to sit around and take in the atmosphere while you wait for an appointment with a membership consultant.

Our girl was called Jeanny – pleasant enough, stick thin and a bit smug, but she didn’t have that empty-eyed way about her so often found in these kinds of places. I was sure she’d have no aversion to cramming three walnuts whips into her mouth (that’s if they had such things in Amsterdam) and swilling them down with a bottle of cheap white wine.

She did though have this annoying habit of falling back on stock phrases, twice she promised to ‘sweat your ass off’, conjuring up unpleasant mental images.

The big question

We were handed questionnaires.

Most of it was basic stuff – name, address, phone number and (worryingly) next of kin – but then there were a few nosier questions at the end. When did you last do any structured exercise? How long have you thought about having the self discipline to do some? All my adult life’ I wrote … and then some. It was working, I already felt the shame.

‘Why have you not done something about the state of your body sooner?’ Too lazy/find the idea of riding bikes clamped to the floor a bit surreal/would rather eat crisps and drink beer. I was surprised to find ‘procrastination’ as an option and readily ticked it. As Julia Roberts said in that film where she played a whore, ‘Big mistake. Huge.’

Didn’t Jeanny keep coming back to it, drawing circles round the word, singling it out as the reason I was sat in front of her. She wanted me to see this as some kind of revelation, when I’ve known since the day I could speak that it is the one thing at which I excel. I’m supremely good at procrastination.

So back to writing. Already this morning, I’ve paid household bills, looked up flight prices, written two letters and read almost every website currently online. There’s a nice clean document open on my desktop, word count 65,657. Maybe a cup of tea or something and then I’ll crack on.

January is a month for loss

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British Writer Mo FanningJanuary is always the month to sit back and look shocked as your waistline joins forces with your wallet to reap revenge for the indignities you’ve made both suffer in the name of ‘having a good time’. Despite all my very good intentions and to the best of my knowledge, having had a pretty lousy Christmas, my bank balance is indeed shrinking in direct proportion to my increasing girth.

I refuse to become one of those people who start hitting the gym with a vengeance just because it is a new year. I remain convinced that this is little more than akin to taking a few steps along that proverbial well intentioned pathway to hell. I’ve peered through the windows and I’ve seen it. Gyms across the country are currently packed with people who remain convinced that paying through the nose for a crappy towel, water bottle and a shiny new gym pass is enough to make you the buff envy of your friends within a few weeks. They wobble around, staring in awe at the machines, occasionally trying a few of the more familiar ones – bikes and treadmills – before heading for a sauna, shower and the exit, never to return again. I know because I am often one of these people. This year I have vowed not to re-embark on working my booty until February at the earliest.

One good thing about January is that it means the return of ‘Celebrity Big Brother’. For those who don’t watch, it is a show which throws together a whole bunch of very minor stars with very major egos in one house and allows them to bitch, fight and whinge for Britain over a three week period while we eager viewers lap up their misery. This year it all got off to a steady start. The ‘celebs’ were as ropey as ever. We were offered Leo Sayer, H  from Steps and former Kenny Everett sidekick Cleo Rocos. It had all the pulling power of a provincial panto. Then the producers played what they hoped would be a trump card. They introduced a new ‘family’. The better known element being all round ‘famous for being famous’ personality Jade Goody. She was joined by her one-armed ex-Rastafarian lesbian mother and nineteen year old football agent boyfriend. Fireworks immediately erupted, the media focussed on what it decided was racist bullying of another contestant Bollywood Actress Shilpa Shetty. To be honest, it gave the show the shot in the arm it needed. Before they arrived, it was about as interesting as watching paint dry. Channel 4 was vilified by the Murdoch controlled British popular press. From the outside looking in, the show seemed to sum up everything bad about British society.

We’ve become a nation that no longer gives people the benefit of the doubt. We no longer think it is our place to take people to one side and show them the error of their ways. Nobody has the time. We’d rather just have our opinions pre-packed and force fed. When the right bandwagon comes past, we happily leap on board. If someone is being called a racist bully, we’ll join in with the chants. It makes us feel good about ourselves, as if we personally are fighting racism or bullying. We aren’t.

In the aftermath of recent events, three girls’ professional reputations lie in ruins. They did little worse than any of the rest of us might do when faced with hours of boredom, a bit too much to drink and finding ourselves in a room of strangers, deprived of all friends or outside stimulation. They had a good old bitch fest, a right bellyache. Now they are being repackaged as the new face of evil. The press has stood by pontificating and yet still putting the boot in. The way these people have been vilified is equally unacceptable. Why should someone be subject to death threats and have their effigy burned on the streets? If ignorance is to blame, why can’t someone just sit down and explain to Jade and her cronies that what they did was wrong? And when they do show any remorse, why can’t we accept this. How much more do we think we have the right to demand from people whose names we would have been hard pressed to recall pre-Christmas?

I’m already bored with seeing long lens pictures of these nobodies, why can’t the paps get to work on something far more interesting? I personally would pay good money for shots of humourless food Nazi Dr. Gillian McKeith PhD (qualification from a non-accredited US correspondence college) tucking into a bucket of KFC and a four pack of Special Brew on a park bench. Why does someone who claims to promote good health look so poorly?

Much as I want to say ‘enough with the moaning’, I can’t. I know now that it is a part of my heritage. The other day I was speaking to an Australian guy. The subject got around to ‘Whinging Poms‘. I wasn’t insulted when he told me that he was tiring of hearing the Brits he worked with indulging in a good old moan, because he is right. We love nothing more than a whinge. Personally I feel my day is wasted if I haven’t had a good old whine about some stupid Dutch law or the utter lack of customer focus in this country. I’d be as bad back home though, so no need for any one nation to take this personally.

I’ll close then by having a good old go about the weather. Why isn’t it getting cold? This is January for goodness sake. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but I really do think it is getting beyond a joke now. We need a decent cold snap. In my street, trees were starting to blossom on New Year’s Day! What is worse is I’ve already been bitten by my first mossie of the year.

Fact of the Month:

Lavender And Tea Tree Oils May Cause Breast Growth In Boys.