Pie Ar5e Squared

I'm toying with the idea of putting on a bit of timber, for the winter months at any rate.  I've always been quite skinny, but as I age disgracefully, I find it increasingly difficult to keep a lid on fat.  I'm still slim, but I have to watch what I eat and drink to a certain extent NOW.  And that is exceedingly dull, believe me.

The idea occurred to me to give being a bit heavier a whizz.  One's appetite always increases at this time of year (January, as I write) so one has to be even more diligent than usual.  Why not then, I thought, go with it for a bit, and let the excess slide off of its own volition in the spring?  I suppose there is a danger than once it's made itself comfy, the extra lard might feel disinclined to piss-off when the clocks change.  I might end-up, 20 years hence, being winched out of the front room of my council flat by a team of burly firemen.  No, perhaps I should remain diligent.  Thin has always been my USP.  I feel I'd be losing a part of myself if I put on weight - ironically.

Your eyelids are growing heavy...can you hear me? Hello?

God save us, I'm tired.  Not a major revelation, I grant you, but this time is different.  I'm really frazzled.  It's an odd conflation of circumstances that's brought this about.  I'm sleeping plenty, but the sleep is very frivolous in nature.  Well, that's my assumption anyways.  I think I'm right in saying that REM sleep is the fella that Mr Brain needs for refreshment.  I've not been getting enough (or any) of that.

I've no real idea why this is.  Diet?  That hasn't changed.  Age?  Hmm...I am a little older than I was, say, 14 months ago.  Whatever it is, shallow sleep is a callous bedfellow; it lulls you into thinking you're going to have a blinding day: in tray decimated, colleagues lost in admiration etc., when in fact you'll spend the waking hours rubbing your eyes with the backs of your clenched fists and trembling.

My boss returned from his summer hols yesterday.  He must have been on the lash like Caligula during it too because he currently on one of this God-forgive-me purgative diets.  No caffeine, no booze - just tofu and crab apples or something.  People amaze me in their mediaeval credulity in these matters.  How the phuck is that regime supposed to do one any long term good?  You can't possibly keep it up, so what the goal of the process?  At the end of it your spirit will have been crushed and it's straight back on the Sambuca and Wagon Wheels.  

I'm quite thin, so people occasionally ask me what the secret is.  My answer is always the same: keep a food diary.  Take a look over it after a month or so.  There'll be some disgusting little habit in there that's causing the damage.  Make a small change to correct this.  If you're eating five choccy biscuits with your morning coffee, have two.  Then give yourself months for this little change to take effect, which it will.  Don't go mental and give up chocolate all together.  This is kind of stunt my sister used to pull and it always fails, unless you're David Blaine.  Which she assuredly isn't.