No pain no gain (and no point)

On the surface the human being appears to be a flawed design. Obviously our brains are magnificent and our thumbs enable us to use spanners. Something an elephant, for instance, cannot do.

However, there seems to be something wrong with our stomachs. It doesn’t matter how many pints of refreshing beer we cram into them, they always want just one more roast potato. And then, instead of ejecting all the excess fat, they feed it to our hearts and veins, and we end up all dead.

Of course, we can use willpower to counter these demands, but this makes us dull and pointless. You need only look at the number of people in lonely hearts columns who neither drink nor smoke to know I’m right. If they did, they’d have a husband. It’s that simple.

What I tend to do when it comes to the business of being fit is not bother. I eat lots, and then I sit in a chair. The upside to this is that I have a happy family and many friends. The downside is that I wobble and wheeze extensively while going to the fridge for another chicken drumstick.

Unfortunately, all this has to stop because am trying to ape the white man. And that if it all goes right, I may have a healthy body.

Last week then, I went swimming in the ocean. The idea was to move my body until the shoulders were screaming so loudly that they are actually audible.

Eventually, that didn't go according to plan, I’d not made enough electricity to power Glasgow and I’d not reached my goal, so I tried to turn around. But it was no good. My magnificent brain was so stunned by what had just happened that it had lost control of my legs. I also felt dizzy and sick. Fondly, I also imagined that I had a tingling in my left arm and chest pains.

Part of the problem is that to go on this new body drive, I must be indulging myself in such activies religiously. This means losing a stone so I have been living on a diet of soups and cereals, which simply doesn’t provide enough calories to rock back and forth in my conservatory for half a day.

Now, one of the things I should explain at this point is that I am always hugely enthusiastic about new projects, but only for a very short time. If I was to get fit and thin, it needed to be done fast, before I lost interest, so once some feeling had returned to my legs, I went for a swim again.

All this has made me dull, thick and, because there’s no beer or wine in my system at night, an even bigger insomniac. And all the while I have this sneaking suspicion that what I’m doing is biologically unhealthy.

Pain is designed to tell the body something is wrong and that you’d better do something fast to make it go away. So why would you get on a tread machine and attempt to beat what God himself has put there as a warning? That’s like refusing to slow down when an overhead gantry on the motorway says “Fog”.

Today, then, my magnificent brain is questioning the whole philosophy of a fitness regime. If God had meant us to have a six-pack, why did He give us the six-pack? In the olden days, people had to run about to catch deer so they all had boy-band torsos and good teeth.

But now, we Darwin to work in a car. Trying to look like a 12th century African is as silly as a seal trying to regrow its legs.

No really. The thing about evolution is that each step along the way has a point. Cows developed udders so they could be plugged into milking machines. And humans developed the remote control television so they could spend more time sitting down.

Fitness fanatics should take a lead from nature. Nobody looks at water and suggests it would be more healthy if it spent 20 minutes a day trying to flow uphill and nobody suggests a lion could catch more wildebeest if it spent less of its day lounging around.

Plainly, then, our stomachs are designed to demand food and feed fat to our arteries for a reason. I don’t know what the reason might be but I suspect it may have something to do with global warming. Everything else does.