Simplify me while I’m here

I’ve always abhorred diets. They’re just so bloody miserable.

I’ve never been “on a diet” except for a brief flirtation with the Atkins thing. That sounded like a heroic anti-diet, promising weight loss on bacon and eggs. But I gave that one up after five days when my kidneys appeared to start packing in.

Now I’m in my 50s and maybe the time’s finally come to face up to the bleak outlook of hypertension and emergent diabetes.

Just look at the fucking state of me: unfit, overweight, randomly nodding off, pissing strange vivid colours.

Simplify me when I’m dead, said young poet Keith Douglas, who in wartime had good reason to foresee his death.

Remember me when I am dead:

Substance or nothing?

Deserving mention or charitable oblivion?

Strip me down and leisurely arrive at your opinion.

Do we have to wait for the processes of death to harden our muscles again?

No, simplify me while I’m here. Pull away the layers of trivia that suffocate us; cut off the noises that fill our heads with mush.  Stop sliding with time and reduce your little life to a concentrated essence of love, laughter, health, fulfilment and happiness. Oh yes.

As I write this I’m half way through a “virtual fast”.  I prefer this term to the unwieldy “fast mimicking diet” – a label used by our blog’s hero Valter D Longo. He may sound like a Bond villain but is in fact a good guy of science.

Valter D Longo – the 109 year old gerontologist

Valter “Longlife” Longo is Director of the USC’s Longevity Institute. He’s done a lot of work on how living things respond to periods without food. Take a brief trip across the web and you’ll see he’s no crank or quack.

Very occasional 5-day periods of fasting (or fast mimicking) rejuvenate our immune systems and promote greater resistance to many age-related illnesses, including cancers, diabetes, Alzheimer’s.  It’s all to do with lowering your levels of IGF-1, don’t you know. Probably a few other things too.

Leaving aside all the trappy science, what is this 5-day diet that enables us to reboot our systems without having to endure a full-on fast?

Here’s the detail:

“The human fast mimicking diet (FMD) program is a plant-based diet program designed to attain fasting-like effects while providing micronutrient nourishment (vitamins, minerals, etc) and minimize the burden of fasting. It comprises proprietary vegetable-based soups, energy bars, energy drinks, chip snacks, chamomile flower tea, and a vegetable supplement formula tablet. The human FMD diet consists of a 5 day regimen: day 1 of the diet supplies 1,090 kcal (10% protein, 56% fat, 34% carbohydrate), days 2–5 are identical in formulation and provide 725 kcal (9% protein, 44% fat, 47% carbohydrate).”

Or to put it another way – drastically cut down your intake of protein.

In mindless ignorance, I’ve skimmed the shallow pool of my scientific knowledge to devise my own 5-day diet. This comprises the regulation vegetable soup, a little fruit, a little dark chocolate, chamomile tea which can just about be raised to its feet with a slice of lemon. A lone boiled egg for minimum protein.

Into day 3 and I don’t actually feel hungry so I must be doing something very very wrong.

Naturally the soup is an outstanding creation of my own made from carrots, leeks, vegetable stock and thyme. (As the cruelly incarcerated Woody Allen said in one of his films: “Fortunately it was a French prison, so the food was… well not bad.”)

use a little spoon and it will last longer

We’ll see how it goes, carefully charting progress until I get run over by a bus.

Longo says that you only need to do the 5-day fast maybe 3-4 times a year, but as I’m such a fat bastard I’m going to do it monthly until you can see my well cushioned bones.

And the real beauty of this regime?

When you’re done with the fast, you can go back to eating and drinking the same old shite you were consuming before.

Go figure, as they say in Southern California.

Some links:

the actual science

interview with Valter D Longo

something in the Telegraph

The Road Less Traveled

After D’s birthday I took her for a night away in the east of England.  Where the hotel, newly and lavishly renovated as it was, failed the Racing Post test. Where D bought an expensive cabinet and I -astonishing even myself – bought soap. (It was, in fairness, the loveliest soap I’d seen.)  Where we visited new places to the north and bought books in Diss.

One of mine was an uncommonly slim volume of writing by Marcel Proust. I dipped in and was instantly amused by a passage, taken from the first preface to his most famous work.

In it, he said he was publishing only one volume of a novel whose general title would be  A la recherche du temps perdu. He would have liked to bring the whole of it out at once, but works in several volumes were no longer being published.  “The young advocate a succinct plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel” he declared, and you can imagine him saying it a little loftily.

“I am like someone who has a tapestry too large for present day apartments, and who has been obliged to cut it up.”

Settling down for further delights, I was gradually let down, or rather led along the curving paths of Marcel’s prose till I lost the inclination to go on.  I recalled vaguely how I’d given up on Swann’s Way, that first volume he prefaced just over a hundred years ago.

Unlike Proust, my memory is vague indeed and unlikely ever to be unlocked sensationally by the taste of a dunked custard cream, but I do recall being struck by the artistic possibilities of the two paths in the novel, Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way:

“For there were…two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen.”

These are the sorts of paths, whatever they symbolise along the way, that end in the churchyard.

The path taken by the punter is the one that leads famously to the poorhouse.

It’s rumoured that some find a different way, making the game pay.  They tend to overlook the obvious,  though, and this stands up to reason because they are by definition a happy few.  They are against the crowd, lone sharks, finders of edges.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –                                                                                        I took the one less traveled by”

said Robert Frost in his famous poem not quite a hundred years ago, and while the two roads in Frost’s yellow wood were ‘really about the same’, let’s not let that get in the way of a point bluntly made.

A wise man once said that the problem with most punters is that they just can’t stop looking for winners.  Which is another, neater, way of saying that they disregard the odds.

I’ve spent much of the summer disregarding the odds. Not a mug entirely, but lazy and unsophisticated.  Now I approach the jumps  with renewed purpose, an admirer of any disinterested punter who found The Clock Leary at Ascot on Saturday, who duly won the race sponsored by his owners at odds of 12/1.

I need to look out for some fresh angles of my own:  to track dark recruits from the point-to-point fields; to prefer Harry Fry to Paul Nicholls on windy wet days at Wincanton; and if nothing else, to stalk and oppose the overbet – stone cold certainties that they are.

I could go on, but the young these days prefer short accounts with few flourishes and diversions, so that’s it.

Gimcrack Dinner: keep your hands off the lever

Steve Harman, the new Chairman of the British Horseracing Authority, gave a speech at the Gimcrack dinner the other night.

Like many before him he mentioned the rare passion that endures within horse racing, and all right-minded supporters of the game will hope he can make a success of the job. The speech certainly reads a lot better than the dire waffle of his predecessor Paul Roy.

Thankfully Harman will not be judged on his use, misuse or – dare I say – leverage of the English language.

In quite a short speech he tells us that he’d like to “leverage loyalty schemes and technology”, and that things would be a whole lot better if we could  “leverage external practices” or maybe “leverage racing’s customer base”.  He’s also a strong supporter of “leveraging all the good work inside and outside of racing” which is something I’m sure we can all agree with (if only we knew what the fuck it meant).

Not many before him will have described the quintessentially British attraction of horse racing as a “huge lever”.  Well I for one hope he can pull it like nobody’s business.

All this reminds me of the lever in The Great Gatsby, which apparently is compelling evidence of Nick Carraway’s latent homosexuality. (“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy. “I beg your pardon,” said Mr McKee with dignity. “I didn’t know I was touching it.”)

But it’s OK these days to touch levers.  By the look of things it’s going to be compulsory over at the BHA for the next year or two.  And if all the leveraging, whatever it entails, enhances “this great sport” (a grand old favourite bit of phrasing that Steve used in his speech not once but twice) we’ll all be happy.

Leaving (levering?) all the piss-taking to one side, it was an encouragingly direct speech. Harman wasn’t afraid to hide the fact that much of racing is “not well”, and that passion, dedication and loyalty can only get you so far if you get nothing back.  He talked about growing the industry rather than managing decline. He talked about his desire for high level collaboration rather than “legacy factionalism”.  In the first half of 2014, he said, we’ll see in more detail what a strategy for growth looks like.

He also talked about chief executive Paul Bittar and his team working hard to further professionalise the BHA – to ensure it is “responsive, accessible, customer-focused.”  I hope these are not empty words, and that the phrase “customer-focused” is wide enough to embrace the poor punter, many of whom are finding their voices in the social media.

A few punters I know have asked questions of the BHA recently – questions on big subjects like doping, and questions on rather simple matters such as the true distance of this year’s Betfair Chase.  But they have not received much, if any, response.

Punters, unrepresented of course at all the big political meetings, would really welcome a responsive, accessible BHA, and it’s not much to ask the richly remunerated Paul Bittar to ensure that his press office provides one fast.